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The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

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21–30 of 76 posts

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#21
post #7

Nobody has the patience anymore to be presented to or read in any form other than bullet points and low information density charts. I grew up before computers and learned to communicate in the absence of all the short attention span distractions that exist today. I remember the first time I picked up a Wired magazine and couldn’t tolerate the insane lack of continuity. I still cannot stand the video style of images p…

In the age of LLMs there is no point in writing long prose. The more content is generated the more people will move to higher information density formats. Why bother with generating long text if the reader is going to summarise it with a LLM anyway? OTOH - citing Ben Affleck: "why would I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?"

What has a higher information density than text? Or do you mean that writing will evolve to become increasingly higher density?

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#22
post #18
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a McKinsey consultant and this reads as kind of crazy. Nobody is ever doing anything with 50 distinct slides. My general advice is a title that is a sentence that explains your point, then a visual that proves it and a sidebar of supporting insights so you don’t have to be an expert at reading the visual. Frankly I think it’s very effective and is very closely tied to writing guidelines. The important thing is ge…

This is the very thing TFA is against. It reduces complex arguments into one-sentence theses, one after another, luring the listener into compliance.

Isn't that exactly what a consultant wants, though?

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#23
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was in my business development phase I was taught to make presentations for C-levels at Fortune 500 companies like this: Make a Powerpoint deck with 50 slides. Compact that down to 20 slides without losing anything. Get to the point where you have 50 slides like that. Repeat this process two or three times until you have a deck that is stupendously high density that gives the impression that you respect their…

I’m a McKinsey consultant and this reads as kind of crazy. Nobody is ever doing anything with 50 distinct slides. My general advice is a title that is a sentence that explains your point, then a visual that proves it and a sidebar of supporting insights so you don’t have to be an expert at reading the visual. Frankly I think it’s very effective and is very closely tied to writing guidelines. The important thing is ge…

McKinsey has a reputation for cataclysmically pointless powerpoints that trick the audience into thinking that they had a point. Could the style you are suggesting be connected to that reputation?

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#24

I've loaned my hardcopy of this classic to many people in my industry. Regrettably it has not had any impact and Powerpoint still runs rampant. I am not a Tufte fanboy but this article hits perfectly.

I am absolutely a Tufte FanBoi, I even got him to autograph my copy of Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#25
post #7

Nobody has the patience anymore to be presented to or read in any form other than bullet points and low information density charts. I grew up before computers and learned to communicate in the absence of all the short attention span distractions that exist today. I remember the first time I picked up a Wired magazine and couldn’t tolerate the insane lack of continuity. I still cannot stand the video style of images p…

Its not that they want to be spoon fed, that is the ever decreasing bandwidth available as info and complexity in environment keeps exploding.

As the saying goes "glue people" just need to know a little bit more about coding than the sales guy, and a little more sales than the coder, little more accounting than the lawyer and a little more law than the accountant etc etc.

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#26
post #11

Possibly unpopular opinion: PowerPoint is just a tool, and most people not only suck at making slides but are poor storytellers to boot. If you are a good storyteller and can effectively use the medium (as in, not just dump a bunch of bullets on a slide), you can actually convey a lot of information in a combined slide + narrative format.

Tufte addresses that in the postscript. It is the first item in it.

I, a brave and iconoclastic thinker, didn't read Tufte's article before arguing that people, not design, are the problem.

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#27
post #7

Nobody has the patience anymore to be presented to or read in any form other than bullet points and low information density charts. I grew up before computers and learned to communicate in the absence of all the short attention span distractions that exist today. I remember the first time I picked up a Wired magazine and couldn’t tolerate the insane lack of continuity. I still cannot stand the video style of images p…

In the age of LLMs there is no point in writing long prose. The more content is generated the more people will move to higher information density formats. Why bother with generating long text if the reader is going to summarise it with a LLM anyway? OTOH - citing Ben Affleck: "why would I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?"

Upvote for the Affleck quote. Damn, that guy is (providing he came up with it himself) not so stupid after all.

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#28
There's no single "style of PowerPoint". People use it for various, different, things, and if you look at a deck made for one purpose through the lens of another, it'll look atrociously bad.

You can use PowerPoint (or Google Slides, etc) to make:

* Make visuals for your talk (in person, or over zoom); your talk is the main thing, and the backing visuals are there to focus people on what you're saying. Those kinds of slides often have a single sentence, image, chart, or code block. Importantly, those slides carry no meaning/story by themselves - you can't look at that deck without the talk itself.

* Handouts, or material to send over email, etc., in which the slides themselves are a thing (you might not be there to talk about them, or you can expand some of it as a follow-up). Slides are tightly packed with information, which needs to be carefully organized. They're usually bottom-line up-front (google BLUF), with on-slide info organized in pyramid fashion (google MBB slide structure).

(Edit to add: people often want to reuse the same slide deck for both uses, compromise on it, and end up with the worst combination. Nobody wants to do things twice over).

Diametrically apart, optimized for different things; if you're skilled at making those, can be super-useful. Trouble is, it's a skill that very few people are tought how to do. We expect people to be able to create and deliver a presentation without teaching them how to do it.

So what most non-experts end up doing, is what's in the linked book excerpt:

* pick a template you like

* add a bunch of bullet points where each bullet point is a paragraph of text

* fumble about with creating a chart that's only obvious to you (visualisation is a different skill in itself!)

* read the slides, slowly, while having your backs turned to the audience

Yeah, that's torture.

But it's not caused by powerpoint, same like spam is not caused by email. It's not because slides are inherently a worse format than articles or books (different, yes, and not for the same thing). It's just that people legit don't know better.

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#29
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the age of LLMs there is no point in writing long prose. The more content is generated the more people will move to higher information density formats. Why bother with generating long text if the reader is going to summarise it with a LLM anyway? OTOH - citing Ben Affleck: "why would I bother to read something you didn't bother to write?"

What has a higher information density than text? Or do you mean that writing will evolve to become increasingly higher density?

> What has a higher information density than text?

Almost everything else: images, graphs, sound, video

Pictures are pretty famously “worth 1000 words,” after all.

Re: The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

#30
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What has a higher information density than text? Or do you mean that writing will evolve to become increasingly higher density?

> What has a higher information density than text? Almost everything else: images, graphs, sound, video Pictures are pretty famously “worth 1000 words,” after all.

Many things can only be said in text, though. Video can work as a replacement for the so inclined because they can have narration.
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