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The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (2006) [pdf]

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

#71

Post by jasdi »

ssivark wrote: post #68
jasdi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Could it be that such increasing specialization (sales, accounting, coder, glue…) is driven in part by decreasing attention spans and ability to focus? Maybe nobody is able to exert significant deliberate cognitive processing on anything beyond a narrow slice that they are already comfortable with.

It's natural. Rate of change is increasing in all fields. So when teams can't keep up, another team is setup to handle whatever is new and then automatically you get divergence in expertise, between the two groups over time. If you specialize in selling on amazon you learn totally different things, than selling in a store. If you specialize in mobile app development, a gap grows with teams who work on web or desktop. Info Asymmetry and Knowledge Gaps between specialists keeps growing with time. So the glue people naturally emerge.

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

#72

Post by mkleczek »

ssivark wrote: post #69
mkleczek wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't clear enough and I agree: art cannot be replaced by LLM (although this is heavy disputed by AI believers). Consuming art also precludes reading summaries generated by LLMs. My comment was about "utility" texts (this is a context of this discussion, I suppose) - my prediction is that we are going to write shorter and more condensed texts to avoid overhead of LLMs use in generating and summarising text.

But why should there be two polar opposites: utility & art? Even when reading comments on HN I appreciate a a well written narrative with clarity and cohesion, instead of an assorted stack of bullet points. The idea is that good writing actually makes you think clearer (both writer & reader); it’s not just a nice to have.

If that was the case people wouldn't use LLMs to generate long text only to use the same LLMs to generate short summaries of it.

What I am saying is not that good writing is useless - rather that good writing is _hard_ and people are lazy. There is way more bad writing than good in the world. Bad writing will be replaced by LLMs which does not make sense because it is still bad - and useless.

Good writing is going to stay but since it is hard it is (still) going to be rare.

In the end my hope is that bad (and useless) writing is going to be replaced by short, dense and useful format.

Of course - this begs the question: what constitutes good writing? Pretty good estimation is that a good writing is the one that is - generally speaking - as information dense as possible (ie. there is nothing you can take away from it without loosing some important information). And we are back to square one - it does not make sense to write anything longer than necessary :)

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

#73

Post by PaulHoule »

jncfhnb wrote: post #50
kqr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’m only skimming the article tbh but all of the slides I’m seeing look terrible and useless. I don’t see much text about reducing arguments to one sentence theses. A one sentence thesis is good communication. That’s the point of a thesis statement. It’s the core idea behind most writing education. If you don’t have a clear thesis up front, then people have to divine what you’re trying to convey themselves bottom up…

You can both be right. Like LLMs, McKinsey offers a combination of competence and bullshit. It hires bright, young, and freshly educated people who can go at problems with energy and a toolbox of the latest tools. Yet, putting a young person in a role like that is an hierarchy-disrupting tactic which can be seen best in the Church of Scientology where they find the youngest staff member they can find to be an "ethics officer".

A primary social hierarchy (Scientology, a corporation, Mao-era China) might feel threatened by various secondary and informal hierarchies (people who practice "the tech" on their own and make changes, workers who have the knowledge of how to do the company's task in their heads but not written down, sysadmins who keep a file of anyone who could possibly help them solve problems in their organization or with their vendors, fox cults, ...)

An accusation that is frequently leveled at McKinsey is that management brings them on to "launder" things they want to do, what I can say is that your slide decks are not just seen by the systems thinkers who are running the show but they are also seen by the people that the people who are running the show want to persuade.

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

#74

Post by vibrio »

OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #17
mkleczek wrote: post #16

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?"

cf. Doonesbury on Californian/Mellow-Speak: https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1979/05/16

Thank you. It’s been a while since I read some Doonesbury. Now, I might go on a bender.

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

#75

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

jncfhnb wrote: post #51
QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I can’t say I agree with that. Frankly even most of the haters will dryly concede that the only thing McKinsey is good at is making powerpoints. In my experience the slide decks are pretty solid, with occasional exceptions. For whatever reason the folks that work in the financial industry seem obsessed with truly pointlessly large decks that reach over 100 pages. Otherwise I think the approach is good, clear, and con…

Your statement of “dryly concede that the only thing McKinsey is good at is making powerpoints.” closely corresponds to my statement of “trick the audience into thinking they had a point”

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

#76

Post by jncfhnb »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #75
jncfhnb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t say I agree with that. Frankly even most of the haters will dryly concede that the only thing McKinsey is good at is making powerpoints. In my experience the slide decks are pretty solid, with occasional exceptions. For whatever reason the folks that work in the financial industry seem obsessed with truly pointlessly large decks that reach over 100 pages. Otherwise I think the approach is good, clear, and con…

Your statement of “dryly concede that the only thing McKinsey is good at is making powerpoints.” closely corresponds to my statement of “trick the audience into thinking they had a point”

Don’t think so
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