Reading Data Graphics is a Moral and Intellectual Act – Part 3

Power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

This essay continues our discussion of Edward Tuft’s Beautiful Evidence and his advice regarding how best to design and analyze charts, graphs, and other visual displays of quantitative information.  He has a lot to say about PowerPoint presentations.

Where I live, in Alexandria, Virginia, just about every week our local school board hears PowerPoint presentations read to them -- presentations that, as described in the previous two essays in this series, more often than not miss the point, exclude relevant context, and leave crucial terms unexplained.  And school board members fail to ask any clarifying questions, no doubt in part because the school board bureaucracy is misleadingly framing issues in ways that give the impression that both the school board and the bureaucracy it services are doing just fine.  In this way, both the PowerPoint presenters and the school board members are failing in their moral and intellectual missions.  They would do well to read Tufte’s chapter entitled “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.”  In it, Tufte writes:

This chapter provides evidence that compares PowerPoint with alternative methods for presenting information … The evidence indicates that PowerPoint, compared to other common presentation tools, reduces the analytical quality of serious presentations of evidence.

Tufte recounts a story told by Louis Gerstner, who describes how, when he became president of IBM, “he encountered a big company caught up in ritualistic slideware-style presentations”:

One of the first meetings I asked for was a briefing on the state of the [mainframe computer] business.  I remember at least two things about that first meeting with Nick Donofrio, who was then running the System/390 business … At that time, the standard format of any important IBM meeting was a presentation using overhead projectors and graphics that IBMers called “foils” [projected transparencies].  Nick was on his second foil when I stepped to the table and, as politely as I could in front of his team, switched off the projector.  After a long moment of awkward silence, I simply said, “Let’s just talk about your business.”

As Tufte writes:

“Let’s just talk about your business” indicates a thoughtful exchange of information, a mutual interplay between speaker and audience, rather than a pitch made by a power pointer pointing to bullets.  PowerPoint is presenter-oriented, not content-oriented, not audience-oriented.  PP advertising is not about content quality, but rather presenter therapy: “A cure for the presentation jitters.”  “Get yourself organized.” … With information quickly appearing and disappearing … [s]lides serve up small chunks of promptly vanishing information in a restless one-way sequence.  It is not a contemplative analytical method; it is like television, or a movie with over-frequent random jump cuts.

And it’s no surprise that if PowerPoint culture has infected the school bureaucracy, it’s reaching down to students:

These PP graph templates are particularly unfortunate for students, since for all too many their first experience in presenting statistical evidence is via PP designs, which create the impression that data graphics are for propaganda and advertisements and not for reasoning about information.  And, in presenting words, impoverished space encourages imprecise statements, slogans, abrupt and thinly-argued claims.  For example, this slide from a statistics course [a slide stating “Correlation is not causation”] shows a seriously incomplete cliché.  In fact, 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.”  Or perhaps, “Correlation is not causation but it sure is a hint.”  Many true statements are too long to fit on a PP slide, but this does not mean we should abbreviate the truth to make the words fit.  It means we should find a better tool to make presentations … Especially disturbing is the introduction of PowerPoint into schools.  Instead of writing a report using sentences, children learn how to decorate client pitches and infomercials.

Tufte then describes his observations as a NASA consultant on technical presentations for shuttle risk assessments, shuttle engineering, and spaceflight trajectories.  In describing the events that up to the space shuttle Columbia accident in which the shuttle disintegrated upon re-entry in 2003, Tufte writes:

In their report, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) found that the distinctive cognitive style of PowerPoint interacted with the biases and hierarchical filtering of the bureaucracy during the crucial period when the spacecraft was damaged but still functioning … At about the same time, lower-level NASA engineers were writing about possible dangers to Columbia in several hundred emails, with Boeing reports in PP format sometime attached.  The text of about 90% of these emails simply used sentences sequentially ordered into paragraphs; 10% used bullet lists with 2 or 3 levels.  These engineers were able to reason about the issues without employing the endless hierarchical outlines and the original PP pitches.  Good for them … In their discussion of “Engineering by Viewgraphs,” the Board went far beyond my case study of the Columbia slides in these extraordinary remarks about PowerPoint: “As information gets passed up an information hierarchy, from people who do analysis to mid-level managers to high-level leadership, key explanations and supporting information are filtered out. … At many points during its investigation, the Board was surprised to receive similar presentation slides from NASA officials in place of technical reports.  The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.” … Then, 2 years later, 7 members of the Return to Flight Task Group, a powerful external review group created by NASA to monitor the post-Columbia repairs of the shuttle, had something to say about engineering by PowerPoint [stating] … “[I]n many instances when data was requested by the Task Group, a PowerPoint presentation would be delivered without supporting engineering documentation.  It appears that many young engineers do not understand the need for, or know how to prepare, formal engineering documents such as reports, white papers, or analyses.”

Even Nobel physicist Richard Feynman, on his work on the first shuttle accident, the Challenger disaster of 1986, wrote “Then we learned about ‘bullets’ – little black circles in front of phrases that were supposed to summarize things.  There was one after another of these little goddamn bullets in our briefing books and on slides.”

Tufte describes research on PowerPoint presentations:

[T]he PowerPoint slide typically shows 40 words, which is about 8 seconds of silent reading material.  The example slides in PP textbooks are particularly disturbing: in 28 books, which should use first-rate examples, the median number of words per slide is 15, worthy of billboards, about 3 or 4 seconds of silent reading material.

Interestingly, given the poor examples of PowerPoint presentation given to our local school board in previous essays in this series, Tufty notes that “among the 2,140 slides reported … the really lightweight slides are found in the presentations made by educational administrators and their PR staff.”

Tufte’s dim view of PowerPoint presentations worked its way to Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, who adopted a no PowerPoint rule.  As Network Capital writes on its Substack:

In the 1997 letter to the shareholders (which we strongly recommend you read), Bezos shared – “We don't do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon,” Mr. Bezos wrote. “Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of study hall.”  Explaining why the employees read the memos at the meeting, the Amazon boss said busy executives “like high school students” often “bluffed” their way through so this was his way of ensuring everyone was on the same page – literally … [H]e joked that new executives were often in for a culture shock while attending their first meetings at Amazon. Instead of passively listening to dull PowerPoint presentations, everyone sits silently for 30 minutes and reads a “six-page memo that’s narratively structured with real sentences, topic sentences, verbs and nouns ... not just bullet points” Its contents are then discussed in detail.

When I was considering how organizational PowerPoint presentations encourage over-simplification and the avoidance of explanations, I remembered a passage from David Deutsch’s book The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, in which the author describes the much different approach science takes by making strides toward increasing accuracy in order to clarify explanations.  As Deutsch writes:

Astronomers nowadays never look up at the sky (except perhaps in their spare time), and hardly ever look through telescopes. Many telescopes do not even have eyepieces suitable for a human eye. Many do not even detect visible light. Instead, instruments detect invisible signals which are then digitized, recorded, combined with others, and processed and analysed by computers. As a result, images may be produced – perhaps in “false colours” to indicate radio waves or other radiation, or to display still more indirectly inferred attributes such as temperature or composition. In many cases, no image of the distant object is ever produced, only lists of numbers, or graphs and diagrams, and only the outcome of those processes affects the astronomers’ senses. Every additional layer of physical separation requires further levels of theory to relate the resulting perceptions to reality. When the astronomer Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars (extremely dense stars that emit regular bursts of radio waves), this is what she was looking at:

Radio-telescope output from the first known pulsar.  Only through a sophisticated chain of theoretical interpretation could she “see,” by looking at that shaky line of ink on paper, a powerful, pulsating object in deep space, and recognize that it was of a hitherto unknown type. The better we come to understand phenomena remote from our everyday experience, the longer those chains of interpretation become, and every additional link necessitates more theory. A single unexpected or misunderstood phenomenon anywhere in the chain can, and often does, render the resulting sensory experience arbitrarily misleading. Yet, over time, the conclusions that science has drawn have become ever truer to reality. Its quest for good explanations corrects the errors, allows for the biases and misleading perspectives, and fills in the gaps. This is what we can achieve when, as [Richard] Feynman said, “we keep learning more about how not to fool ourselves.” … Telescopes contain automatic tracking mechanisms that continuously realign them so as to compensate for the effect of the Earth’s motion; in some, computers continuously change the shape of the mirror so as to compensate for the shimmering of the Earth’s atmosphere. And so, observed through such a telescope, stars do not appear to twinkle or to move across the sky as they did to generations of observers in the past. Those things are only appearance – parochial error. They have nothing to do with the reality of stars. The primary function of the telescope’s optics is to reduce the illusion that the stars are few, faint, twinkling and moving. The same is true of every feature of the telescope, and of all other scientific instruments: each layer of indirectness, through its associated theory, corrects errors, illusions, misleading perspectives and gaps. Perhaps it is the mistaken empiricist ideal of “pure,” theory-free observation that makes it seem odd that truly accurate observation is always so hugely indirect. But the fact is that progress requires the application of ever more knowledge in advance of our observations … It may seem strange that scientific instruments bring us closer to reality when in purely physical terms they only ever separate us further from it. But we observe nothing directly anyway. All observation is theory-laden. Likewise, whenever we make an error, it is an error in the explanation of something. That is why appearances can be deceptive, and it is also why we, and our instruments, can correct for that deceptiveness.

Sadly, whereas telescopes have been refined to capture increasing layers of explanatory data, PowerPoint seems to have been designed to increasingly dilute and distort explanatory data.  Which brought to my mind the following classic joke:

In the Beginning was the Plan

And then came the Assumptions

And the assumptions were without form

And the Plan was completely without substance

And the darkness was upon the face of the workers

And they spoke among themselves, saying,

“It is a crock of excrement, and it stinketh to high heaven.”

And the workers went unto their Supervisors and sayeth,

“It is a pail of dung and none may abide the odor thereof.”

And the Supervisors went unto their Managers and sayeth unto them,

“It is a container of excrement and it is very strong, such that none may abide by it.”

And the Managers went unto the Directors and sayeth,

“It is a vessel of fertilizer, and non may abide its strength.”

And the Directors spoke amongst themselves, saying one to another,

“It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong.”

And the Directors went unto the Vice Presidents and sayeth unto them,

“It promotes growth and is very powerful.”

And the Vice Presidents went unto the the President and sayeth unto him,

“This new plan will actively promote growth and efficiency.”

And the President looked upon the Plan

And saw that it was good, and the Plan became Policy.

This is How PowerPoint Helps Make Shit Happen.