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Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

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Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#111

Post by hypertele-Xii »

sosborn wrote: post #104
rahimnathwani wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a nice PDF with screen-shaped pages" Right, but you can create such a thing with a word processor. Just change the page size or orientation. Sure, the page breaks might not default to where you want them, but you can add page breaks wherever you want, and don't need to create a text box for each paragraph.

More importantly (to me anyway), copying large swaths of text is so much more reliable in a word doc. Copying text in a pdf (derived from PowerPoint no less) is a special hell.

Unbelievable, I've never copied text from a PDF without some error. It's baffling how broken that system is compared to say, text selection in web browsers.

If you start doing fancy CSS tricks you can break that too, of course.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#112

Post by xoxxala »

brimble wrote: post #19
stuff4ben wrote: post #15

I've seen presentations with Powerpoint that suck the life out of you and also ones that inspire and excite. It's not the tool, it's the presenter and how they wield the tool. Reading word for word off a text-heavy deck in a monotone with no images or diagrams is a recipe for disaster. I tend to have my decks (back when I was doing presentations) be relatively text-lite and involve images/diagrams that back up my tal…

PowerPoint decks for the upper tiers of an organization can take on a whole different character. I shit you not that it's common to pass them around in email as if they were a document format, even for information that is never intended or expected to be presented. As if they were PDFs or something. It's crazy. [EDIT] There's also a kind of horrendous, illegible house style some places, that's expected to be how thes…

I worked as a games producer for a major video game company 20 years ago and had bimonthly project green light meetings. Every 60 days, I had to produce a 80-120 slide powerpoint with info from development, marketing, PR, sales, finance, etc using their awful house layout. Then print these massive tomes for the executives. They would ignore everything else, and the presentation, jump straight to the finance info at the back of the deck and discuss the EBITDA for 10 minutes and then end the meeting.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#113

Post by giantg2 »

pdonis wrote: post #55
giantg2 wrote: post #13

Another NASA screw-up that they're trying to pin on the vendor engineers, just like Challenger. The title is not reassuring. Conservatism in engineering is essentially about creating safety margins through conservative estimation. The title is saying we need to be careful because a tile was likely penetrated. Hell, if I remember correctly they were reporting that there was known tile damage on the news before reentry…

> Another NASA screw-up that they're trying to pin on the vendor engineers, just like Challenger. And, for context, Edward Tufte, whose review of the slides is being referenced in this article, is the same one who misunderstood and misrepresented what the actual issue was during the briefing the night before the Challenger launch, in his paper reviewing the presentation the engineers made then. Edit: previous HN disc…

Wow, I didn't know that. What a poor track record.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#114

Post by bumby »

phicoh wrote: post #106
bumby wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but to be charitable, this was a real-time and evolving situation where I'm willing to bet the slide was expected to be finished "yesterday"

This seems to be the kind of slide made by someone without a lot of experience presenting work. The other issue is, some people really, really, don't want to speculate. In this case it seems that the person who made the slide probably assumed that the tile could be broken with a high enough probility. But because it was outside all available data, the slide says that we don't really know. Of course, anybody in a posi…

>It is really weird to conclude that based on absence of data, it is probably safe.

Considering that's exactly what happened nearly 20 years earlier with Challenger, it seems to be more common and likely the result of a number of cognitive biases. We read these with some hindsight and are disconnected from all the other pressures (schedule, budget, peer, etc.) they are dealing with at the time.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#115

Post by giantg2 »

TobTobXX wrote: post #56
giantg2 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The title of this post is claiming this slide killed 7 people. That's a pretty bold and accusatory claim that seems to leave out the other failures, right?

From the article (emphasis mine): > This, however, is the story of a PowerPoint slide that actually _helped_ kill seven people.

Any evidence to support that claim? NASA employees raised concerns about the severity of the damage, which shows the contents of the slide were effectively communicated to NASA engineers, but that leaders ignored them. Thus the slide was not a contributor.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2271525/It-better-d...

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#116

Post by ryandrake »

techsupporter wrote: post #103
silvestrov wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When engineers are not allowed to use "alarmist language" the organization often changes to use such unreadable texts. I don't expect "foam strike more than 600 times bigger than test data" would go over well politically. You'd be telling the audience that these people will die while everybody watches. No manager want to be the messenger for that kind of messages.

> When engineers are not allowed to use "alarmist language" This has been a recurring theme throughout my career, the struggle between being seen as "alarmist" and accurately conveying urgency. We get this in the medical field all of the time. "Outcomes delivered via mechanism seen as potentially contraindicated" or some other spaghetti. I've been in these meetings many times, where we (the individual contributors) h…

Yep, a lot of organizations have a cultural taboo against telling the bosses bad news. The way one manager taught me: If it's good news, use plain language and big text. If it's bad news, soften it, shrink it, slather it with jargon, obfuscate it. Don't hide it but don't raise an alarm. Couch any unpleasant language with possible-this and unknown-that. Terrible advice but that's the way a lot of exec readouts work.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#117

Post by giantg2 »

lostcolony wrote: post #62
TobTobXX wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article (emphasis mine): > This, however, is the story of a PowerPoint slide that actually _helped_ kill seven people.

Yep; this slide was worse than useless in that to the given audience it could instead read as an endorsement that launching is fine.

This wasn't about a launch decision. An audience of engineers would not view this slide as an endorsement.

Re: Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)

#119

Post by paulpauper »

Has nothing to do with PowerPoint or the language:

The shuttle is inherently dangerous. An endless # of things can go wrong. The Shuttle program should have been grounded anyway on the basis of cost and danger. Too bad it took a tragedy for that to happen.

hindsight bias

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