The New York Times discovers the perils of military powerpoint:
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.
….
Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”
Way ahead of you, oh paper of record.
The Edge of the American West 
21 comments
April 27, 2010 at 5:42 am
TF Smith
You know about this, I take it?
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1
April 27, 2010 at 7:29 am
kid bitzer
your title, by the way, sounds great when sung to the tune of george and ira’s hit, “fascinating rhythm”.
“hypnotizing chickens,
you got me on the run,
hypnotizing chickens,
i’m all a-quiver….”
April 27, 2010 at 8:25 am
rea
At least the miltary will be able to afford health care . . .
April 27, 2010 at 9:27 am
Urk
That’s a nice tune for it KB, although it does little to displace the snippet of Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life”* which has been running through my head since I read the post’s title this morning. And of course that means that I’ve had cruise ship commercials playing behind my eyes as well. Grrr.
*The phrase comes from Burroughs tho, right? I seem to remember running into it in naked Lunch as a teenager and thinking “Well, if Iggy can get through this then i probably can too.”
April 27, 2010 at 10:45 am
Elliott
Someday – maybe even tomorrow – a historian/academic will write a book about how the military’s ‘PowerPoint culture’ grew to influence key decision-making processes. Seeking significance for their work, they will blame the entire quagmire of the Iraqi occupation on PowerPoint.
April 27, 2010 at 11:29 am
silbey
Someday – maybe even tomorrow – a historian/academic will write a book about how the military’s ‘PowerPoint culture’ grew to influence key decision-making processes. Seeking significance for their work, they will blame the entire quagmire of the Iraqi occupation on PowerPoint.
And they will be right!
April 27, 2010 at 2:15 pm
dilbert dogbert
The term: “Power Point Ranger” has long been in use in the military.
April 28, 2010 at 3:08 pm
silbey
You know about this, I take it?
I did not, though I knew of Tufte’s general anti-Powerpoint leanings. He’s quite charmingly naive about “written reports,” though.
April 28, 2010 at 5:16 pm
TF Smith
“Charmingly naive”?
Wow…that’s quite a loaded statement.
Tufte is writing from an engineering perspective; difficult as it may be for some, complex data can be presented with clarity through the standards of technical writing – the 5-paragraph field order (which I expect you are familiar with) being a very basic example.
Maybe not the humanities, of course, but that is a different world.
April 28, 2010 at 5:30 pm
Charlieford
I’ve never seen a visual aid that couldn’t be better expressed in a nice block of prose.
April 28, 2010 at 5:38 pm
Charlieford
I decided not to wait till someone went nuts on me. My statement is clearly untrue. Graphs of debt, unemployment, men-under-arms, or pie charts of govt. spending, or the pictures of Abu Ghraib, are all better than prose to convey the essence of what you’re trying to convey.
But. I think a lot of people should have their default setting as “tell,” and only when necessary “show.”
That will keep us from having to see inane comments that can just be said on a screen, where they look even more inane than they are.
It forces the speaker to supply in verbal, rhetorical elements, the “color” that keeps things interesting, instead of relying on a visual trick.
And, it forces or at least encourages folk in the audience to use their imaginations. It makes them active. And it makes for better learning.
April 28, 2010 at 5:59 pm
silbey
I think that when your answer to the problems of Powerpoint is “replacing Powerpoint with Microsoft Word,” as Tufte puts it, you’re overlooking the ways in which prose can obfuscate just as much as a presentation.
April 29, 2010 at 8:36 pm
TF Smith
Actually, given the ability Tufte demonstrates with graphics, I think his answer to the problems of powerpoint is replacing bullet points that have neither subject, verb, nor predicate with:
A) clear, standardized prose that does; and
B) graphics that actually impart information
His points are general, but are a specific response to the dangers of “viewgraph engineering” (as opposed to blueprint engineering, for example); if you have spent any time in industry recently, his points are very credible.
Of course, one could simply ask him – Yale is not exactly a difficult place to get to…
Finally, not to argue from authority or anything, but there are those who apparently see his POV as useful; see:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/president-obama-announces-more-key-administration-posts-3510
April 30, 2010 at 4:04 am
Charlieford
“prose can obfuscate just as much as a presentation.”
silbey, I really don’t think anyone since Orwell–or, heck, Plato–would deny that.
It’s rather that once you opt for PowerPoint, the trend is for the format to take too large of a role.
I realize there are many people who use it who are exceptions to this trend, so if you’re reading this and you use PP, I’M NOT TALKING ABOUT YOU.
Once a screen is thrown up, that’s where the audiences eyes go. Realizing this, the presenter feels a need to make it interesting. He/she does this by adding visual embellishments. These, disconnected from the content of the talk, can only detract, and indeed suck energy out of the entire experience.
Moreover using it establishes a new distinction into the room: there are those with PP (the presenter) and those without. What you really want is a community of minds and a freewheeling discussion. The presenter-audience distinction already upsets that, and it’s hard enough to surmount that distinction as it is, but PP just makes it worse.
Besides, it just really has become so ho-hum.
April 30, 2010 at 4:39 am
silbey
Oy, folks, come on. Remember that I’m the one who posted the original critique of Powerpoint. You’re not making points with which I disagree. I’m just pointing out that written reports are prone to abuse as well.
April 30, 2010 at 7:50 am
kid bitzer
i vehemently condemn your failure to condemn what you condemn with as much vehemence as i condemn it.
April 30, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Charlieford
good point…
April 30, 2010 at 6:39 pm
TF Smith
The thing is, one can analyze and either agree with or argue in opposition to a written report; ppt at its worst (as witness the graphic shown by the NYT, and some of the MT material criticized by Tufte) can be either so non-sensical as to be disregarded or simple visually overwhelming.
May 1, 2010 at 5:09 am
silbey
can be either so non-sensical as to be disregarded or simple visually overwhelming.
There’s no inherent reason why a written report can’t be either nonsensical or overwhelming.
May 4, 2010 at 9:36 pm
TF Smith
Yes, but one can mark-up a written report with big red letters, marginalia, and highlights…
Powerpoint, in its natural domain, amounts to transient pixels. It’s like trying to mark-up smoke…
May 5, 2010 at 10:08 am
silbey
See my comment at 4:39 am.