[HN Gopher] The Cognitive Style of Power Point (2003) [pdf]
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The Cognitive Style of Power Point (2003) [pdf]
Author : azalemeth
Score : 55 points
Date : 2021-05-29 15:23 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.inf.ed.ac.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.inf.ed.ac.uk)
| agomez314 wrote:
| Wonder if there is value in providing slide-less talks. Where the
| speaker engages the audience and provides a written report with a
| logical flow for deeper analysis if needed.
| nerdponx wrote:
| This is pretty much how good university lectures are conducted.
|
| The instructor provides some "lecture notes" ahead of time
| and/or some other assigned reading, then the lecture session
| itself is more of an overview, discussion, and/or extended
| worked example, with lots of classroom engagement.
|
| However, it's more demanding on the audience this way. So it
| depends on the purpose of the session.
| neolog wrote:
| Note this works only if the audience actually does the
| homework in advance. I heard Amazon has people do the reading
| at the start of the meeting?
| loph wrote:
| Pretty sure I bought this report for money about 15 years ago.
| aj7 wrote:
| PowerPoint's cognitive vagueness and thinness meet a fundamental
| need. 95% of these presentations are done by individuals that
| seriously lack the organizational POWER to deal with issues. So
| they are often show and tell, directed so as not to offend or
| usurp the power of the the highest ranking person in the room.
| Marching orders are rarely given by PP presentations. "The boss
| would like to see you and..."
| ape4 wrote:
| "We" like no slides in a presentation, plain text mail, markdown
| for documents, RSS for news feeds, IRC for chat, Graphviz for
| diagrams, ...
| cosmojg wrote:
| I don't know about you, but I certainly like all those things,
| with some amount of flexibility of course. What are you trying
| to communicate with the quotation marks around "we"?
| ape4 wrote:
| I was too lazy to find another word. I do prefer those things
| too. Also RTF for documents. I guess I meant: it appears to
| be the community consensus.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| I wrote patent-application flow-diagrams with PowerPoint. It did
| the job ok but maybe there are better tools for that too
| _pmf_ wrote:
| There's also this piece (paywalled) about the role of PowerPoint
| in the making the second Iraq war happen:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| PowerPoint is a tool.
|
| Like any tool, it can be used well, and serve its wielder, or it
| can be used badly, where the wielder becomes it servant.
|
| I've used PP and Keynote plenty. I prefer breaking away from
| them, as soon as possible, but they are pretty good for helping
| to establish a structured context to a class or presentation.
|
| They just need to be used correctly.
|
| I was just writing about Tufte (who is heavily cited by
| everyone). He _loathes_ PowerPoint. He gives a pretty good class
| on how to convey information without the usual PP pie chart BS.
|
| Most of my presentations are actually kind of useless, if
| provided as class resources. That's because they are simply
| background props to what I'm saying.
| rvilj wrote:
| Interestingly, the example he uses about correlation isn't true:
|
| > Probably the shortest true statement that can be made about
| causality and correlation is "Empirically observed covariation is
| a necessary but not sufficient condition for causality."
|
| Correlation isn't necessary for causation, so ironically the
| supposed mutilation used to fit on a PP slide - "Correlation is
| not causation" - is actually far more correct.
|
| The same mistake is also made in Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein's
| new book [1].
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/economeager/status/1395791301627596806
| djoldman wrote:
| This depends on the exact definition of causation.
|
| Arguably, causation is merely a human word for "A always
| happens when B happens."
|
| A causes B or vice versa is one of those things where it's true
| until it isn't.
|
| Causation is frequently used to mean that B will always occur
| when A occurs. The problem is that no probability is truly
| 100%.
| rvilj wrote:
| Even with that definition, you won't necessarily observe
| correlation between A and B.
|
| See the example used in the twitter thread I linked:
|
| > Imagine driving a car, reaching a hill and pumping the gas
| as you begin to go up so that your speed is constant. The
| correlation between pressing on the gas and the speed of the
| car is zero but they're obviously causally related, it's that
| the agent is optimizing speed!
| ypeterholmes wrote:
| NASA blaming the Challenger tragedy on Powerpoint is pretty rich.
| p_l wrote:
| Not Challenger, but Columbia, and not on Powerpoint, but usage
| of powerpoint in the organization leading to reduced visibility
| of data meaning those who received such _reports_ didn 't get
| the really important data.
| skytreader wrote:
| Whenever people complain of "death by Powerpoint", I remember
| this article from Reader's Digest in the 2000s about the Carl
| Hayden Community Highschool Robotics Team who upstaged no less
| than MIT in competition.
|
| In one part of the contest, the teams had to discuss their
| design. One of the judges asked the Carl Hayden team why they had
| no Powerpoint slides.
|
| "Powerpoint is what you use when you don't know what to say,"
| answered one of them without skipping a beat.
|
| Ballsy, of course, but the subtext of the story was that the team
| really had their hands full as they tried to punch above their
| weight class. They knew what they were doing but there was no
| shortage of opportunities for them to improvise and the
| presentation was one such instance.
|
| I was in high school when I read the piece and that's the line
| that stuck with me. Since then I always made sure I know my
| material, slideshow or no slideshow.
| jl6 wrote:
| Pre-covid I always hated PowerPoint because I thought of it as an
| especially inefficient way to store and transmit information. But
| I have learned to appreciate it now that remote-interaction is
| all via a screen anyway. It feels like a very natural
| collaboration format - one screenful of information at a time.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Almost all of the deficiencies of PowerPoint typically complained
| about are deficiencies of the speaker: the inability or
| unwillingness to make compelling slides, or, very frequently,
| trying to create one presentation which serves as a discussion
| aid and a formal document of record -- about as likely to succeed
| as engineering a device to land on Mars and explore the Mariana
| Trench.
|
| PowerPoint is just a two dimensional layout program -- criticisms
| of the actual software would be around how easy it is to type
| this kind of text, or align these kinds of objects, etc. I'm sure
| thousands of such deficiencies exist but that's never what you
| hear about.
| lcuff wrote:
| Hmmm ... In 1982 I heard a talk by Edsger Dijkstra given at my
| company. As he stepped up to the overhead projector he said "I
| asked for 20 feet of blackboard, and I got this ..."
|
| As a (former) presenter, I found myself constantly struggling
| to figure out how to get what I wanted to say onto a slide. I'm
| going to say, I want a projector that can project on to a wall
| 10 feet high (although I'd probably only use the top five feet)
| and 15 feet across. I personally have bad eyes, and don't want
| to resort to anything less than _really_ easy to read text
| size. It 's not just powerpoint, but the physical
| infrastructure that becomes standard support for powerpoint
| that becomes the enemy of deep, complex ideas.
| aj7 wrote:
| No. Read the article again with an eye towards enforced
| structure. A software package may not suitable for a task,
| despite the efforts of the programmer.
| deathanatos wrote:
| Your point is directly addressed in the essay:
|
| > _This makes one good point: responsibility for poor
| presentations rests with the presenter. But it is more
| complicated than that. PP has a distinctive, definite, well-
| enforced, and widely-practiced cognitive style that is contrary
| to serious thinking. PP actively facilitates the making of
| lightweight presentations.
|
| > _This essay reports evidence based on several thousand
| slides, 5 case studies, and extensive quantitative comparisons
| between PowerPoint and other methods of communicating
| information. The results are clear:* some methods of
| presentation are better than others. And PowerPoint is rarely a
| good method. [...]
|
| > _In this question, the tool metaphor does not provide
| intellectual leverage. Some tools are better than others; some
| poor performances are the fault of the tool. Saying that the
| problem is with the user rather than the tool blames the
| victims of PP (audience, content, presenter)._
|
| > _Nearly all the evidence of the essay suggests that there is
| inherent defect in PowerPoint, unless one advances the
| entertaining alternative hypothesis that nearly all PP users
| are lightweights and nearly all users of other methods are not.
| This is not the case; PP has inherent defect._
| spoonjim wrote:
| But most people who for example, give a wedding speech, also
| do a terrible job. Essentially, most people are uncompelling
| speakers.
| azalemeth wrote:
| At my grandmother's funeral, a family friend from South
| Africa (who I hadn't seen since I was ~5) gave a speech --
| I'd forgotten that he was a retired university lecturer. It
| was one of the most powerful, beautiful pieces of oratory I
| have ever heard: he told the story of her life in South
| Africa (where she was born) in a way that was new to me, my
| mother, and utterly captivated a spellbound church.
|
| This point -- that, by comparison at least, most people are
| uncompelling speakers -- is something that bears repeating.
| prionassembly wrote:
| > I'm sure thousands of such deficiencies exist but that's
| never what you hear about.
|
| Maybe as a side-effect of telemetry, the usability of
| PowerPoint and Excel unceasingly improves, to the point that
| it's impossible to compete with the former.
| ghaff wrote:
| >trying to create one presentation which serves as a discussion
| aid and a formal document of record
|
| It can depend on the context. A presentation that I'll give at
| an event is mostly fairly worthless as a leave-behind. It has
| relatively few words and is graphically rich. On the other
| hand, I sit through a lot of presentations at work where the
| slides basically _are_ a document (in a form that a lot of
| people find more digestible than a standard text document). And
| if the speaker is good, they 'll spend their interactive time
| hitting what they think are some of the highlights. I don't
| have any real problem with that.
|
| One of the nice side effects is that if someone skims a slide
| of particular interest to them and they see something
| confusing/interesting, they can ask the speaker about it even
| if the speaker didn't bring it up.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| > if the speaker is good
|
| Some do good jobs.
|
| Others just read the bullet points.
|
| On the other hand, the bullet points require at least a bit
| of organization, unlike the stream of consciousness drivel
| that too many "planning documents" seem to exhibit.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| I've just finished Robert Gaskins book on the early history of
| PowerPoint.
|
| He makes this exact point however I'm inclined to disagree.
| Trying to convey complex information using PowerPoint is like
| consuming all your meals through a straw.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Slides help to drive the discussion and convey relevant
| information. The slides are meant is bullet points to allow deep
| dive in whatever direction is desirable. Open discussion without
| structure simply leads to ratholing and consumption of the entire
| meeting slot.
| j4yav wrote:
| Slides are terrible in most situations. I have found it is better
| to edit a document together, if you need to share your screen at
| all. Then the source of truth is updated automatically as the
| meeting outcome and there isn't a proliferation of decks each
| with part of the big picture.
| rhema wrote:
| I (and my co-authors) published a paper that was highly-
| influenced by this work
| https://ecologylab.net/research/publications/mache_present.p... .
| It argues for more dynamic (Prezi) like presentations. I think
| Tufte is not as much of an academic as people tend to think, but
| he has fantastic intuition.
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