Generally, it went well. But frankly I was pretty disappointed.

Most reviews were quite good (again), but I'm harder on myself. ;-)

First off, I was using a Windows machine. Not my usual (only using it because TrueCrypt only supports Windows for OS encryption; can this be fixed).

As a result, I forgot to bring a VGA->DVI conversion dongle, and therefore wasn't able to test the video. This meant that come showtime, despite spending ~10 minutes trying, I was unable to get 2-screen presenter mode to work in openoffice. For me, presenter mode is crucial; I always use it. This meant I wasn't able to see the next slide or my notes. And thus, I was flat out extemporizing most of my talk.

I also forgot to bring a presentation remote - though given the problems w/ video I didn't have the time to test that anyway. I was planning on giving the presentation more dynamically, without the lectern in front of me. Ah well, next time.

To make that worse, I drastically overestimated how long my content would run (usually I underestimate). I noticed from my backup timer (i.e. my cellphone) that I was about 2/3 through with only ~30 minutes down. I panicked a little bit and started overextending even more, filling in examples and references from memory that I hadn't expected to have to talk about.

I'm reasonably good at doing things off-the-cuff when I have to, and it's a subject I know well, but still… I really don't like having to rely on that skill rather than prepared examples. Makes me nervous and reduces the quality. I completely messed up one reference (to the two-factor theory of emotion), did a couple prompts poorly, choked on some of the ad hoc examples (e.g. the Wason card task problem), and fell back on mere bald assertions for some of my points that I should've anticipated. Which, tsk, I hate when people do that.

I "ummed" a lot, like I always do. That's another habit I should break somehow. Hard one to do.

I forgot to tell the video angel to cut immediately on all of my slide transitions. The currently released video (and the live streaming version) outright missed a lot of crucial slides, which makes remote participation impossible for some of the examples. That's lame. Hopefully FeM fixes it, but still, lost opportunity for all the people who were watching it live.

Speaking of—holy shit were there a lot of people in that room! o.o According to the BCC, Saal 3 fits 351 people seated theater mode. There were more lining all the walls, the front stageside areas, etc. 83% of responders to my unofficial feedback page had seen it remotely, and I've heard the general CCC average is ~3x remote vs local viewers. That's a lot. It was kinda intimidating for the first minute or so when I was still aware of it. (After that I was pretty much in zone and only aware of the things directly salient to my goals, like who was nodding or asking a question, what time it was, etc.)

Also speaking of, I totally failed on the whole "repeat back shouted comments/questions" thing. I totally do know better. I'm not sure what I should do to prevent this in the future, since it's definitely an issue of attentional memory - perhaps a card on the lectern reminding me?

Because of the fuckup with travel, my talk was rescheduled three times (!), and my discussion slot was several hours after the talk. That probably meant fewer people attended; no way to really know. Oh well. The discussion group was still pretty good - couple dozen people. I was actually extremely impressed with the level of knowledge they had; for example, we touched on Asch, Milgram, & Zimbardo experiments and they all pretty much knew about 'em. That was surprising. Of course, that's a self-selected subgroup, so I probably was talking to the cogsci geeks of the conference. ;-)

I could've (and should've) prepared a lot more content. I guess next time I'll aim to fill about 2x what my slot is, and just have it set up so I can easily skip bits depending on where I am on time. I should also have uploaded the slides earlier; got a couple complaints about them being missing when someone went to look.


I got one inquiry about potentially doing this presentation for a private company (a pentesting / research group, IIRC?). That would be pretty awesome. I'd love to do more speaking gigs. (If any of you are interested in having me speak for your company or other group, please let me know!)

I should probably submit it to some other conferences also, as I'm sure it'll improve a lot w/ practice. I wonder what conferences would be interested…

I should also think of a topic for next year at CCCamp. I definitely want to go. Maybe something on social cognition (if I can figure out how to make that participatory)? A talk-sized version of my meditation workshop? I'm honestly not sure what, as most of my other interests don't make for what I'd consider to be awesome talk material (i.e. new, interesting, and audience-participatory). Suggestions would be appreciated.


Here's what my anonymous reviewers said:


Official feedback page

Rating (/100) N
Participant knowledge 30 43
Topic importance 50 42
Content quality 60 41
Presentation quality 90 41
Audience involvement 100 40

Great
One word: A W E S O M E

Sadly, the speaker did little more than psychological tricks. Very disappointing. From the title "for hackers" I would have expected some application of psychological patterns e.g. for social engineering. This way it was just a standard motivational speaker kind of talk. Should not happen on this conference.

Interesting insights, nicely presented. Saal1 would have sufficed...

great speaker, some things were known already, but a lot fun with audience interaction

It was a really enjoyable talk with great experiments for the audience

first really great talk in terms of content, presentation and audience involvement. the time was to short to ask all the importent questions at the end.

The stream could have shown the slides more often, especially during the sections where the audience was divided into two parts (During at least one such question not a single part was shown on the stream). Also, a little more explanation why we do things as we do and less "these is how we behave" would probably have been interesting.

hei sai, i was hoping for more hacking: i learned that i should scare people i want to sleep with to increase their adrenaline level and make them more susceptible to seduction, but there is so much more... how do i confuse TSA officers into ignoring me? (It's easier to make them freak out and giving me an anal probe, but also less tempting. :-) how do i keep somebody's rationality busy to make them make emotional decisions without filtering them through reason? how do i avoid being abused in that way? very entertaining, and perhaps you have your reason to not make it any more practical :-). just wanted to let you know.

was great you need more

excellent talk! Very nice to do a 3-hour follow-up workshop

Ein wirklich genialer Vortrag der mit einbezug des Publikums gezeigt hat wie jeder mensch doch nicht 100 prozent rational sein kann obwohl er es gerne von sich denkt. Absolut empfehlenswert und haette tatsaechlich noch laenger sein koennen
(Google translation: A truly brilliant lecture shown with the inclusion of the audience as every man has but not 100 percent can be rational even though he does like to think of themselves. Highly recommended and would indeed be there longer)

Interesting, but I knew too much of it already.

To bad this didn't go in Saal1, maybe next year... Evolve.

Interesting presentation, however IMO not crucial for the 27c3. Maybe worth keeping one slot for a similar presentation next year.

The best science talk on the congress this year!

The topic was a good fit for the conference. However the presentation and the content was quite weak. There was probably not much new information for the 27c3 audience... Also the experiments with the audience didn't really work out...

Pretty good talk, but lost a bit of momentum near the end, especially the bouncer / number sequence anecdotes were a bit hard to get for me.


Unofficial feedback page

n=27

Scale: 0 Sucked. 1 Not good 2 Meh 3 Good 4 Rocked!

Average:
Speed 3.00
Clarity 3.19
Slides 2.96
Participation 3.50
Interestingness 3.70

Participant knowledge (5pt scale):
Average difference pre/post: 0.64 (n.s.d. between categories)

All raw comments (minus occasional names/emails):

what the people in the room hear ist NOT what the people on the stream hear!

Thanks! Very nice and interesting talk.

"very nice talk! unfortunately the internet people didn't see the slides all the time when you split the audience (we didn't see anything at all then ;-))...otherwise, very very very good!!! thanks for it

haha, nice last question ;-) my answers might therefore be biased? ;-)"

When you ask a question to the audiance and somebody shouts an answer, don't just say "Yes, you are right", but also repeat the answer (same as questions in the Q&A without microphone, but this wasn't a problem about this).

I think it would have been cool to build a bridge from cognitive science to human-machine-interaction.

"Congratulations from Greece !!!
Keep up the good work."

"Was a great talk. Even though I knew about a lot of those, and know I'm not rational, I still screwed up at many of the problems.

I like the very last question in this from. Would be interesting to know if it influences the rating of your talk.

Book suggestion:

Daniel Gardner, The Science of Fear: Why we fear the things we shouldn't and put ourselves in greater danger."

"Cults like ""Scientology"" or ""Christianity"" etc are not as dangerous as politics and the the neofeudal lords implementing it with our approval. More on manipulative influence, persuasion and brainwashing thru debate and (daily) news etc. would be nice and needed. The misinterpretation and misassessment of risks also cannot be stressed enough; with more recent policy-agendas perhaps?
- sidenote on presentation: please repeat everything on which you react (answering an inaudible question or just laughing on something funny is quite frustrating for the viewer)
Go on and keep it."

Slides, slides, we want slides ;-)

"Thank you!

Tuesday I worried the talk will not be at all.
Very glad everything got in place Wednesday.

I've better recepted the concept of -
this became more clear to me due to lecture:
a) physical activity -> influence on emotional level
b) when preoccupied, additional input will lead to a more impulsive / emotional response.

...and I do have a personal question:
which i'll ask another time."

Keep doing what you do and hoping to see some of these stuff included in your Youtube channel.

I liked your talk. You have a very illustrative way of presenting difficult topics.

"I'm currently listening to the audio book:
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas (2007/2010). The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

You've surely heared of it? It mentions a lot of what you also talked about."

I'd also like to have part 2 next year (or even before at another conference)




A prof of mine (who also gave me some great followup info to read):
"I don't know whether the secrets knowledge of cognitive psychology should be shared with a bunch of hackers (!), but it was a pretty interesting talk."


Twitter
@unixtippse: Rough edit of pretty good talk by @saizai #27c3: Cognitive Psychology for Hackers
@socialhack‎: @saizai looking at your #27c3 talks. great stuff! feedback comes soon.
@rothorsekid‎: Loved @saizai 's talk at #27c3 Golden Moment: "This is a REAL attack." #cogsci

[I failed to record 'em at the time, and twitter search is poor, so most are lost. alas.]


Blogs
http://www.piratenpartei-heilbronn.de/2011/01/piratenrelevante-vortrage-auf-dem-27c3/
Finde ich ein äußerst spannendes Thema, wie man bei manchen meiner Postings eventuell erahnen kann.
(GT: "I think a very exciting topic, as you can possibly imagine in some of my postings.")

https://chtekk.longitekk.com/index.php?/archives/65-27C3-Day-3.html
14:00 "Cognitive Psychology for Hackers", awesome talk on psychological "hacks" on humans, biases and so on that influence our decision making, very well done, great examples, I'll probably buy the book he cited at the end, as I'm very interested in this too, and he even mentioned "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", a FanFiction I've been following, as being very much spot-on in its explanation of rational thinking.

http://www.arthur-schiwon.de/27c3-day-3
A very great session has been hold by Sai who did fantastically in explaining Cognitive Psychology". Very interactively he showed off deterministic human behaviour on different circumstances. Interactively, because he did some tests with the audience every now and then. More or less it was about how people decide or make opinions based on feelings or assumptions instead of statistics and facts, but also what to communicate to people if you want to achieve a certain goal. He recommended a book, as well, if you want to dive more into this topic. It is Judgement Under Uncertainty by Tversky and Kahneman.