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Comment by 3JPLW | Hacker News Reader

Interesting; I've also been highly discouraged from attending his class from a recent attendee. She felt he wasn't invested in actually presenting the material and it just felt like an advertising racket to buy his books. Things may have changed in the past 20 years.

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I went earlier this year and I thought it was a good experience. The key is to arrive on time and sit there and do the silent reading that he assigns before the lecture starts.

I sat in the front and he approached me. He was friendly, asked me what I did, made some suggestions on books and articles to explore. He also signed my book, which was cool.

I'd take the class again for sure.

I think it's important to just go in with an open mind and not treat everything he says as gospel. I think he presents some ideas that very much cut against the conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley and that was nice to hear.

So yeah, I think it'd be worth your time to go. Plus, just because someone else didn't like it doesn't mean you won't get a lot out of it. Unless you go and see for yourself, you can't really know.

I went to his one day event maybe 6 years ago, with a group from grad school.

Had the same experience, while it was cool to get all of his books, the actual presentation really wasn't that great.

There was also like 200-250 people in the room at least. Way too big for "intimate" learning.

I attended the "See, Think, Design, Produce" one-day session that Tufte put on with guest speakers Jonathan Corum, Bret Victor, and Mike Bostock (back in 2014). It was a great set of lectures, but TBH, felt that Tufte's talk was the least engaging/practical/applicable.

I'm definitely a bigger fan of Tufte's books than his in-person lectures.

I would agree with that assessment. When I went, I attended in a huge room with hundreds of other people. It was not a seminar in the sense of being able to interact with the teacher, but a lecture. And the lecture did not present a sequenced set of actionable principles, but bits and pieces consisting of the history of design, critiques of existing designs, an occasional bit of advice, and a lot about Tufte. Overall, I did not feel that I'd received enough value to offset the entry fee and the time.

Edit: clarity

Fwiw the books are included if you buy a ticket, and the books are the medium of much of his work so it would make sense for him to extensively reference them

It would be a shame if true. I suppose if I gave the same talk for 20+ years my enthusiasm might wane.

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