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

368 points by tk75x 5y ago

athenot 5y ago
The original article by Edward Tufte which is referenced by this blog post can be found here: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
MattGaiser 5y ago
In general, we give people too much of a pass for not bothering to read what they are supposed to (and I myself am guilty of this as it seems like it preparedness for meetings is useless as nobody else reads even on the rare occasions I do speak). That is part of the reason Powerpoint is everywhere. You cannot assume that people have read anything before the meeting, you cannot assume they will read during the meeting, so you need to read it out loud to have a decent chance of it being received. I am also not thrilled accepting the use of titles and formatting as a excuse to skim 100 words. It is just the refusal to read/comprehend on a smaller scale.
- carlmr 5y ago
  As the communicator your job is to ensure that the audience gets your message. This slide is so comically bad that I wouldn't expect anyone to understand the gravity of the situation after seeing it. If this was a presentation done in high school they would have gotten a failing grade. And I think we can expect more from university educated people.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    I get this viewpoint pragmatically as nothing is going to change, but my point is that we can expect utterly nothing from the audience and excuse their refusal to do anything beyond accept Twitter feed like input. If someone wrote "I approved the landing as the title of the slide did not seem alarming", that person would be resoundingly rebuked. That would be an outrageous official rationale and the person would be regarded as lazy and negligent. But that is practically what happened and what we excuse.
  - Graffur 5y ago
    But it's not a high school presentation done for the sake of doing a presentation. It's not an audience who will review the performance. It's giving information to _professional_ _experts_ who are _responsible_ for consuming that information.
    - carlmr 5y ago
      >it's not a high school presentation I agree, we can expect more from the presenters here. Experts are humans, experts get bored, experts can't necessarily follow your bad presentation. Underneath it all we're smart monkeys, not robots. You can't force yourself to pay attention indefinitely. It's not in our biology. No matter how smart you are if you hear hours of presentations in a day, you will only take home a certain maximum amount of the stuff that seemed important. If you're a presenter, and you have something life-and-death important to say, you should repeat it, you should put it into simple words, you should use appropriate language, voice and maybe even pictures to make it clear.
      - Graffur 5y ago
        Experts are human but it is their responsibility to not get bored in an important presentation regardless of the presenter. That responsibility means the fault is assigned to them and not the presenter. I agree with your last paragraph but after any bad event you could point at the presenter and say "I didn't consume the information they were providing - therefore blame them not me"
        carlmr 5y ago
        I would still maintain that only because you're an expert you don't have superhuman abilities of controlling your attention/boredom. You say we can't absolve the experts from responsibility here, but it appears you want to absolve the presenters of any kind of responsibility. Why do these experts need superhuman focus abilities while the presenters needn't even have the presentation skills of 8th graders? But in the end we should maybe change the format of conveying information completely, whoever is to blame here.
- brimble 5y ago
  > That is part of the reason Powerpoint is everywhere. You cannot assume that people have read anything before the meeting, you cannot assume they will read during the meeting, so you need to read it out loud to have a decent chance of it being received. I've been told—very seriously—by multiple management consultants that public and private sector executives alike won't read a damn thing unless it shows up in powerpoint format, and even then you have to walk them through point by point or they'll miss most of it. This, when the documents are coming from people they're paying tons of money specifically to tell them stuff. The company in question (you've heard of them, if you've heard of any management consulting companies at all) quite literally had an off-shored office dedicated to producing PowerPoints decks from notes overnight, while everyone on an actual engagement was sleeping. The primary tangible output of an engagement, as I understand it, is, overwhelmingly, PowerPoint decks. It's the Final Draft of the upper-end management world—apparently, you'll be dismissed and lose face if you show up with anything else, or even send something else in an email.
  - wil421 5y ago
    100% believable. I know someone who is a COO of a smaller company by employee count but very high revenue. They literally pay an offshore company to produce basic bullet points overnight based on notes.
  - db48x 5y ago
    It’s not like that everywhere. Apparently at Amazon, the first 20–30 minutes of any meeting are dedicated to reading and taking notes on a memo, then the rest of the time can be spent discussing the contents of that memo. This ensures that nobody has to sit through any presentations, and also that everyone actually has time to read an in–depth document with the information that they actually need for every single meeting that they attend. I wouldn’t want to give up engineering, but I think that sounds like something I could put up with if someone forced me to be an executive.
- giantg2 5y ago
  No love for anyone questioning NASA on here. This will probably get downvoted to. I mean, NASA is the one who called in the vendor engineers to answer questions they had. If you didn't get answers to those questions, or if the answers weren't clear enough for you, then NASA needs communicate that. You can't get the information you want if you don't ask the questions. Everyone here is blaming a slide deck (that had the information on it!) instead of asking how NASA could have ignored that information. Slide formatting is a pitiful excuse for lack of due diligence by the recipients of that briefing - the people responsible for the safety of the at-risk personnel.
gabrielsroka 5y ago
How about death by a tiny gray serif font?
- deleted 5y ago
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  - deleted 5y ago
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- folkrav 5y ago
  The size looks the exact same as this very site to me. It's #5e5e5e (effective, as it's actually a slightly transparent RGBa value) against #fff, so a contrast ratio of 6.48:1, well within WCAG AA standards, and a tiny, slight shift to #595959 would be enough to meet AAA.
  - gabrielsroka 5y ago
    Chrome Lighthouse on both mobile and desktop said that TFA did not have a sufficient contrast ratio. It doesn't look too bad on my desktop, but on my Android which is set to 130% it's almost unreadable. I had to use reader mode. And it doesn't resize on mobile, probably because they're using px in their CSS instead of em or something scalable.
    - folkrav 5y ago
      You were specifically speaking about serif grey text on white, which is pretty much what I just told you - WCAG AA compliant. [1] You weren't talking about Lighthouse nor mobile specifically, so I just answered with whatever info you gave out. [1] https://i.imgur.com/SF5WTCa.png https://i.imgur.com/SF5WTCa.png
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  The more this comment gets downvoted, the more it looks like death by tiny gray serif font, making the comment quite funny.
zomg 5y ago
this is why whenever i write slides, each slide gets a title and a subheading. the subheading provides the implication of the slide and its contents. done properly, one could read the heading and subtitle of each slide and never need to look at the contents, unless some specific detail is desired/needed.
sklargh 5y ago
I give Tufte's (admittedly imperfect) thoughts on this deck and David Foster Wallace's This is Water (https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/ https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/) to every new member of my team to read and make it apparent that I expect them to have command of each document's implications.
- jquery 5y ago
  Losing DFW is such a tragedy for mankind. Are there any living thinkers on his level?
  - sklargh 5y ago
    Not in the literary space.
junon 5y ago
Fascinating, I'm familiar with the incident but never heard this aspect of it.
giantg2 5y ago
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, but that they didn't know the extent. "NASA felt the engineers didn’t know what would happen but that all data pointed to there not being enough damage to put the lives of the crew in danger." If you thought they didn't know, then ask them what they do know! It's right on the slide that flight conditions are outside of test parameters and that the mass of the projectile was much higher. How the F do you work at NASA and not understand the basic principles of mass, velocity, and energy well enough for that to stand out enough to ask questions or run your own calculations... The reason the slide is laid out the way it is, is because it's describing the thought process and creates a deductive argument for how they got to their concern. This is a presentation for a briefing for other engineers, not a conference or sales pitch. It's supposed to be formal and contain the synopsis of technical points. Using projectors for technical briefings predates the use of PowerPoint. I see nothing wrong with the layout in that context. Edit: why downvote without a reply? NASA has a history of blaming vendors when they screw up. This looks like another example to me. The presentation format does not have any issues given the setting and target audience.
- dekhn 5y ago
  You're being downvoted because the entire process that lead to this decision has been massively analyzed and the root causes were determined.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    And was it determined that this slide killed 7 people, as claimed in the title? That seems overly dramatic and ignores the other root causes.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      No, it wasn't this slide.
dmix 5y ago
> this foam, falling nine times faster than a fired bullet Wouldn’t the foam initially be travelling as fast as the spacecraft? So it’s just the time between it’s release and hitting the wing to accelerate.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Yep, that's why the test speed estimates 200 fps. There's no mention of if the incident velocity is similar to the test velocity though.
- csours 5y ago
  The foam accelerated down and the spacecraft accelerated up.
- wdurden 5y ago
  Don't dare try to question the narrative with physics and science. A Feynman and an O ring in ice water or a Tufte on visualizations will always be hired in at certain levels. For heaven's sake never go down the rabbit hole about how often the shuttles lost heat tiles. It was the foam, unforeseen and unforeseeable.
  - wdurden 5y ago
    Oh, but yes, that PP slide was bad. Symantic's More on a Mac Plus would have allowed a better job 15 years earlier.
- CommieBobDole 5y ago
  That's correct. The CAIB report says it was traveling at a relative speed of "625 to 840 feet per second" at the time of impact. Which technically is the speed of a bullet, but just barely. Nowhere near nine times. http://s3.amazonaws.com/akamai.netstorage/anon.nasa-global/CAIB/CAIB_lowres_full.pdf http://s3.amazonaws.com/akamai.netstorage/anon.nasa-global/C...
stuff4ben 5y ago
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 talking points. And I've seen image-heavy decks that really don't convey anything either.
- brimble 5y ago
  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 these documents look. The US military and any big businesses that work heavily with them are infamous for this. They routinely produce some comically terrible decks and graphics. I wouldn't be surprised if that weird, seemingly-intentionally-hard-to-read style is also present in at least some parts of NASA, especially up at the administration level.
  - stuff4ben 5y ago
    Been there, and unfortunately had to participate in that. Execs sometimes have a hard time conveying information, so PPT to the rescue! I want to blame management schools for their over-reliance on PPT, but in all honestly, it's hard to teach people to be good communicators.
  - treesknees 5y ago
    At a previous job, my favorite to see were the ones with 3 slides. It was like nobody could communicate information without powerpoint. 1. Title slide with company logo 2. Content slide with 2 or 3 bullet points 3. Closing/thank you slide with contact info
  - conductr 5y ago
magpi3 5y ago
I just realized that more time has passed since the Columbia Shuttle disaster (19 years), then passed between the Columbia and Challenger disasters (17 years). That seems impossible to me. I remember reading each of the astronaut's bios after the Columbia disaster, and the same thought kept echoing in my head: what a tragedy, what a waste. Seven remarkably talented people. I had no idea until I read this article how easily their deaths could have been avoided.
- ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
  >Seven remarkably talented people. I had no idea until I read this article how easily their deaths could have been avoided. In reality, there was likely nothing that could have been done once the damage occurred. Example source (form the 3 months after the disaster) here [1]. At the time no space shuttle was kept ready to launch for rescue (though this changed after this disaster) and their options here were limited. A common thought is 'just dock at the ISS' but the shuttle didn't have the fuel to reach it (future flights would ensure they were in the same plane to be able to dock there). A more in depth review years later(with a summary here [2]) did find that it may have actually been possible to launch another shuttle in time, but it would have had to have skipped safety checks, and importantly, launch with a known issue on board (the foam strike possibility). And even then, the rescue mission would have had to gone off without a hitch, because even in the absolutely bare minimum amount of time required, the Columbia crew would have been dangerously low on oxygen. [1] https://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/030430save/#:~:text=The%20answer%2C%20according%20to%20a,ship%20and%20its%20seven%20astronauts https://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/030430save/#:~.... [2] https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue-plan-that-might-have-saved-space-shuttle-columbia/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue...
gmiller123456 5y ago
Kinda pointless to show the slide without the audio of the presenter to go with it. Unless we're thinking the presenter just read the slide verbatim with no extra context, and no questions were asked, which would essentially defeat the purpose of having a presenter and audience present at the same time. I know I've seen presenters actually do that, but the author didn't provide any indication that that's what happened here.
- 300bps 5y ago
  The audio of the presenter would add additional context but the PowerPoint presentation is objectively bad. It’s a wall of text. It should have had a single sentence in bold giant font: WE HAVE NEVER TESTED AN INSULATION COLLISION AT ANYTHING CLOSE TO THIS LEVEL
- whartung 5y ago
  Well, that's kind of the point. The people making the decisions, whether they listened to the presentation or not, perhaps gave too much credence to what was on the slide. The audio portion is temporal, even if recorded. You're there in the moment listening, but it doesn't necessarily last. But the slide is "eternal". Always there to be referenced, or passed along. The slide was going to be viewed repeatedly over a longer time frame. Biasing the memory of those who may have been at the presentation, and serving as a "single" source of truth for those who did not. As much as PP is meant to be a visual AID, most folks are actually pretty lousy at using it that way, and PP has morphed, even if unintentionally, as an artifact of record. I'm as guilty as the next guy wanting to skim the PP deck rather than listening to the presentation. I can skim a deck in 5m, vs sitting for 60m listening. Similarly for technical papers. Read the intro, the summary, skip to the end, read the conclusion. Only if any of what I read is actually interesting will I dig deeper in to the paper.
  - thrwy_918 5y ago
    > Similarly for technical papers. Read the intro, the summary, skip to the end, read the conclusion. This isn't an appropriate comparison. The purpose of the conclusion is to present the findings of the paper, whereas the purpose of presentation slides is not (or at least, should not be) to summarize the content of the presentation.
jimmaswell 5y ago
> This allowed NASA managers to imply a hierarchy of importance in their head: the writing lower down and in smaller font was ignored These managers were REALLY that braindead? These are NASA managers in charge of life-or-death decisions, and their dull eyes glaze over as spittle puddles underneath them because they're too stupid to read one whole entire paragraph worth of text without ignoring subheadings because they "don't look important"? I hope they're happy with the result of their childish intellectual laziness.
- throwthere 5y ago
  I think it’s getting at cognitive bias more than intellect
- einpoklum 5y ago
  > These managers were REALLY that braindead? These are NASA managers in charge of life-or-death decisions If you're in charge of 10000 life-or-death decisions, and are on a tight schedule, you are unlikely to give each of them its proper attention.
  - Chris2048 5y ago
    This doesn't sound like a normal decision, but a rather big one. Also, after 9,999 decisions, I'd expect you to be pretty good at picking out what's important.
  - Graffur 5y ago
    It's still their fault and not the person who created the slide.
tgflynn 5y ago
> There were a number of options. The astronauts could perform a spacewalk and visually inspect the hull. NASA could launch another Space Shuttle to pick the crew up. Or they could risk re-entry. That's not how I remember it being presented to the public. The official word at the time was that there were no feasible rescue options. Yes, they could have done a spacewalk to inspect the damage but if it had been bad there still wasn't anything that could have been done. I think the main problem with launching a rescue mission was the time it took NASA to get a shuttle ready for launch.
- giantg2 5y ago
  I agree. I think there is a disconnect on what was known at the time vs what this retrospective article is assuming was known at the time.
- gambiting 5y ago
  Yeah I definitely remember reading a full analysis about what would be required to actually launch a second shuttle in time to rescue them, and it would require nothing less than war effort for an operation never attempted before, and of which literally every single part would have to work first try, with no delays, and even then there was barely enough time to do it.
  - hbn 5y ago
    If this is true then it's increasingly bold of this article's author to blame the deaths of 7 astronauts on a single engineer for not getting the information hierarchy correct on a powerpoint
    - gambiting 5y ago
      I think this is the right summary: https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue-plan-that-might-have-saved-space-shuttle-columbia/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue... Basically yeah, it could have been done, but only by pulling out one of the other shuttles out of active maintanance, skipping a whole bunch of repairs and necessary checks, launching in record time, and actually managing a situation where there are two shuttles in orbit, something NASA wasn't exactly prepared for at the time. And the biggest question of all - what if the second shuttle becomes damaged in the exact same way on the way up? That's not to say that NASA shouldn't have at least attempted a rescue. Knowing anything about the way US approaches situations like this, it would have been a "no expenses spared" effort and they would at least try. But unfortunately it's extremely likely that the second shuttle would have also been lost on the way, with crucial maintenance and checks skipped just to make it space worthy in time.
codeflo 5y ago
Linked from Tufte’s article, I found this interesting comment from someone’s experience at Microsoft: [1] > Attempting to have slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts makes for bad visuals and bad documentation. Yet, this is a typical, acceptable approach. PowerPoint (or Keynote) is a tool for displaying visual information, information that helps you tell your story, make your case, or prove your point. PowerPoint is a terrible tool for making written documents, that's what word processors are for. I think that’s on point for many companies. A lot of the terrible slides you see in meetings are actually intended as documentation after the fact, and few people recognize (or care) that this makes for a terrible presentation. Ironically, I think Powerpoint isn’t such a bad tool for creating handouts. If the intended reader reads the document on their screen instead of printing it, a nice PDF with screen-shaped pages might actually be close to optimal. You just have to be 100% clear whether you’re creating a document or a presentation. [1] http://mamamusings.net/archives/2005/11/19/the_culture_of_the_deck.php http://mamamusings.net/archives/2005/11/19/the_culture_of_th...
- rahimnathwani 5y ago
  "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.
  - sosborn 5y ago
    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.
    - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
      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.
csours 5y ago
You don't see the cultural assumptions in the slide. You don't see why defensive phrasing is used. You don't see the recriminations that people have gone through in the past. One slide and bad culture killed seven people.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
I don't buy the title. This is not just a normal, routine presentation. This is an all hands on deck emergency and discussion. And NASA isn't just a bunch of MBA's, but rather people who have spent their entire careers immersed in this kind of stuff. No matter what is one the slide, I expect that the audience asks detailed questions. Even if the slide has just a big thumbs up emoji, I suspect you would still get a lot of really hard questions. Think about presentations on programming, where someone in the audience points out that the example code on the slide is incorrect/won't compile/undefined behavior I would expect a bunch of geeks (which I think would be there at NASA) to scrutinize the slide and try to find any flaw in the logic. Especially when the lives of people they deeply care about are on the line. If they are so cavalier about human life that they just skip the details of the slide while making literal life and death decisions, it speaks of a very deep culture rot that goes far beyond PowerPoint.
- conductr 5y ago
  > I don't buy the title. IDK. I too like to think the discourse and Q&A would have signaled differently than the slide. But, this is also 2003 and people generally had not gotten great at communicating via powerpoint yet. It's still bad now, it was horrible then. A unformatted list of bullet points was obviously still an acceptable slide format which tells me a good deal of how much slide skillz these folks utilized. So, I do believe the slide title. I feel like it could have just as easily been discussed prior to the slide, it was agreed the test was acceptable or risk was low, and so the title was just trying to indicate that "it's been pre-agreed there is no problem here" then outlines some of the concerns which were considered.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> Imagine if the engineers had put up a slide with just: “foam strike more than 600 times bigger than test data.” Then they would have been fired unceremoniously and replaced with engineers that knew better than to make their bosses look bad. (who themselves would then, of course, been held responsible for apparently preventable deaths). Stop blaming the engineers for this stuff. This is the fault of the timeline chasers.
- einpoklum 5y ago
  > Then they would have been fired unceremoniously and replaced with engineers that knew better than to make their bosses look bad More engineers need to risk this and raise red flags, publicly, about potential lethal faults. Yes, you will suffer if you get fired; but our education as engineers (if I may include myself among those ranks despite being a software guy...) must be such that we would find _not_ raising the red flag shameful and despicable. So much so that it would seem far worse than losing one's job.
ModernMech 5y ago
I have an issue with the title of this piece. PowerPoint did not kill anyone. There are good people out there writing PowerPoint, and they should never be made to feel like their presentation software is responsible for seven people dying tragically. This was an engineering failure and a communication failure, but cannot and should not be laid at the feet of PowerPoint. Alternative title: death by ears, how failing to listen and communicate killed seven people.
yummybear 5y ago
A question I often ask myself (though I don't work with anything with actual human risk) - when are my concerns valid and when am I coming off as just having a bleak outlook. My own personal experience is that it's easier to be concerned with the small things (we have to have naming conventions), than with big things (are we building the right thing). I think there is a tendency to think "it'll probably work out".
rhema 5y ago
Tufte isn't exactly wrong, but the way he writes has so much certainty in it. In reality, the design choices people make in the media they use has as much to do with social norms and culture as what really works. Alternatives like Prezi exist, but are not really going to be accepted in formal presentations https://infovisu.com/assets/pubs/linder2015beyond.pdf https://infovisu.com/assets/pubs/linder2015beyond.pdf . If you really bring me a physical piece of paper today, I doubt I would be able to keep track of it.
- ssivark 5y ago
  As cool as it might look, does Prezi actually solve any real problem/need in information presentation? The spatial & hierarchical organization of the presentation feels very gimmicky for 99% of the presentations where it is absolutely irrelevant.
Veedrac 5y ago
The first step they went wrong is using a slideshow in the first place. This was a time critical scenario, anyone who needed to be making decisions should have been part of the engineering discussions from the beginning. They should have been having interactive conversations going over what they knew and how they knew it. The engineers had no time to be making slides for a management and that wasn't interested enough to be in the room with them in the first place. Slides make sense as a way to introduce the outline of concept to a broad audience in a way that requires much less effort than 1-on-1 discussions. They are not a means for coming to decisions. If you need to make a critical, life- and business-shaping decision off the back of a side deck, you should instead delegate the decision to someone who knows more than you.
D13Fd 5y ago
PowerPoint is not the problem, it's poor presentation of information. Yes, you can de-emphasize information in a powerpoint presentation, just like you could with a chalkboard, overhead slides, or any other way of presenting information to a group. So what?
- arrow7000 5y ago
  Yes that was the point. Nobody is blaming PowerPoint the program.
areoform 5y ago
The article doesn't do the slides nor the evidence justice. It might be more illustrative to study the original article by Edward Tufte, which the writer (and I) learned about the issue from, https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0001yB-2238.gif https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0001yB-2238.gif https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0001yB-2239.gif https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0001yB-2239.gif I think it's why I think teaching engineers how to draw and do good design is important. How big is a cubic inch? How big is the crater in the heat shield that we're talking about? It would have been better to draw comparisons and explore things. Here's a simple sentence that could have done better; "Sir, our test database was for objects the size of an average icecube. The thing that hit the wing was the size of seven and a half footballs. It's 640x larger! [chart that shows just how much kinetic energy we're talking about] We're looking at somewhere between 640x to 1000x more energy than we've ever seen. We have a problem." A friend and I did an interview with Don Eyles a while ago and he said something that haunts me, "if you see something, say something" https://twitter.com/_areoform/status/1501589762599112704 https://twitter.com/_areoform/status/1501589762599112704 I'd like to go a bit further. If you see something, design and explain something. Challenger is a great example of this; Dr Tufte covers it extremely well, just laying out the boosters and the blowthrough they experienced from left to right on a chart that has temperature as the X axis, you can see clearly that it gets worse as the temperature drops. But no one at NASA or Thiokol thought about doing that. No one thought about humanizing the data. They knew how important it was. They tried to say something. But they couldn't express it. It's not enough to just show people the data. We need to get people to understand it. And that's often social suicide. It's easy for people to want to remain stuck in their status quo, no one likes the "negative person", but that's what ends up getting people killed in safety critical environments. And that's how we get messes like the ones we're in today. One particular one that comes to mind is climate change, I am unsure if most people are aware of this, but it's very similar to the failure expressed here. Most of the scientists whose work is consumed by the IPCC and the models that are published by the IPCC know that the "consensus" is wrong. Except, it's wrong in the opposite direction to what certain people want it to be. The reality is far worse than what the models suggest. The models still don't include the loss of permafrost - what's worse is that they don't model the non-linearity of permafrost loss, methane emission, that then sparks more warming and more permafrost loss etc, https://www.woodwellclimate.org/review-of-permafrost-science-in-ipccs-ar6-wg1/ https://www.woodwellclimate.org/review-of-permafrost-science... nor do they include effects of how the climate would change of ocean conveyor currents shut down (AMOC in particular is of significant interest, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/12/concern-grows-over-atlantic-ocean-conveyor-belt-shutdown https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/12/concern-grows-over... ). They also don't model the melting and release of clathrates from the ocean, or the effects of ocean acidification, and several other non-linear processes. I had a very polite, but heated argument with one of the scientists involved and he told me that they aren't going to include that, because if they do, the numbers will look much worse and they'll be dismissed as apocalyptic loons. Which brings us, elegantly, back to the point that Dr Feynman made in his remarks about the Challenger disaster, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."
andi999 5y ago
So what would have been a (realistic) alternative instead of trying to reenter the athmosphere with a broken tile?
dqpb 5y ago
In my experience, it's nearly impossible to convey information so accurately that the the receiver is likely to make the same decision you would make. There is a simple low-effort high-information solution to this problem - have everyone vote (or bet) on the decision. This, more than anything else, will reveal whether or not you've reached understanding/consensus/alignment. (This is not to say that the final decision should be made by voting, rather it's to gauge the level of consensus)
bambax 5y ago
> Imagine if the engineers had put up a slide with just: “foam strike more than 600 times bigger than test data.” Maybe NASA would have listened. Maybe they wouldn’t have attempted re-entry. Yes. This proves PowerPoint isn't to blame per se, but how it was used.
subhro 5y ago
Three kickass books I found very helpful in improving my slide-foo and hold the attention of my audience: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596522347/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596522347/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470632011/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470632011/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1101980168/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1101980168/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... If you only have time to go through 1 book, I would recommend Slide:ology.
rhacker 5y ago
The title is wrong - it didn't kill 7 people. And it is stated in the article that it "helped" kill 7 people, but even that is a leap. For all we know the slide actually reduced the percentage chance of this happening by .0001%. We can't actually know. We might as well blame it on the guy that was in charge of the foam order but had an extra extra long poop in the morning that reduced his work hours that day and he ordered 24 minutes to late and in those 24 minutes it caused other companies to get foam orders in first and a really good mixture batch came out and the next was sub-par and that's what the shuttle got. Basically chaos theory.
- karaterobot 5y ago
  Are you just saying that the powerpoint slide didn't literally kill the people, the explosion did?
- arrow7000 5y ago
  Yeah. So why not walk off a cliff? Who knows what will happen when you walk off a cliff? It's impossible to know. Chaos theory and all that.
CountDrewku 5y ago
elfrinjo 5y ago
If you are impressed by this, wait until you see Colin Powell's Iraq slides
paulpauper 5y ago
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
anonu 5y ago
I would be peeved at the typos in the slide. That seems sloppy if youre dealing with this kind of work.
dang 5y ago
Related: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19668161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19668161 - April 2019 (127 comments) Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24115837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24115837 - Aug 2020 (1 comment)
zardo 5y ago
Is the implication that the slide was presented without discussion? You can't judge a presentation based on the accompanying visual aids without considering the verbal content.
PaulHoule 5y ago
Diane Vaughn's The Challenger Launch Decision misattributes responsibility for the disaster to the meeting in which a similar slide was shown. When the shuttle design was finalized in the late 1970s they knew it had a 2-3% chance of a hull loss per launch. They were still planning to launch it 50 times a year so that would have meant losing a shuttle and crew every year! The shuttle had hundreds of critical flaws and that 'normalization of deviance' meeting at which slides like this were shown at was a routine part of each shuttle launch. For each of these unacceptable situations they had to convince themselves that, with some mitigation (or not), they could accept it. It was inevitable that something like this was going to happen and then there would be recriminations about the details of that meeting. Every other crewed space vehicle had an escape system to get the crew away from a failed rocket. The Challenger crew survived the explosion but were killed when the reinforced crew section hit the ocean. Similarly the Colombia astronauts were killed by a thermal protection system that was "unsafe at any speed". When the first few shuttles were launched there was a huge amount of concern about tiles breaking and coming off. Once they'd dodged the bullet a few times they assumed it was alright but it wasn't... In the literature "normalization of deviance" has turned from a formal process used in managing dangerous technology to incidents such as: surgeon takes a crap and goes to work without washing his hands, forklift operator smokes pot and operates, etc.
- dr_orpheus 5y ago
  You can broadly say that both Challenger and Columbia disasters can be attributed to failures in communication. But the Rogers Commission Report (presidential commission for investigating Challenger) doesn't really show quite the same scenario. At the Flight Readiness Review for the solid rocket boosters before launch the engineers of Morton Thiokol (the solid rocket booster manufacturer) objected to launch because of the detrimental effect of the cold temperatures on the o-rings in the solid rocket boosters. They had never launched in that cold of temperatures before and previous test data had shown erosion of the seals on previous flights. These concerns were not communicated by the Morton Thiokol management or NASA present at that flight readiness review to any of the higher level managers that got final approval on launch. For Challenger it was a known issue and people specifically said "don't do this". [0] https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v1ch5.htm https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v1ch5.htm
vjust 5y ago
That powerpoint is truly opaque. The culture of work that resulted in that powerpoint being used hopefully is no more. I wonder if one can connect that to the Boeing Max disaster. We don't need Tufte and his subtle points to see this was an abominable piece of communication. More important, would be the question "is it safe to call out a bull shit slide in a corporate meeting". We hear of how Bezos or Jobs would be rude and obnoxious to their employees when something was not laid out clearly. This, on the other hand is where politeness takes us.
shashurup 5y ago
I still cannot get why was it a big deal to go outside and check the tile?
beeforpork 5y ago
Very interesting! I will start my future presentations with 'The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint...' :-) But this '...has grown exponentially...' is just such BS. sigh I just cannot get used to this expression entering lay language.
nickdothutton 5y ago
PPT as it is used, or any similar software performing the same function, as used in the same way, is a cancer.
sumanthvepa 5y ago
I’ve seen a lot of management consulting decks, and they tend to be very information dense. But a lot of effort is put into making sure that the each slide conveys exactly the message that the consultant wants to convey. Also the slides are designed to be read and used outside of the actual presentation, often as reference material.
oconnor663 5y ago
The title presumed that the crew could have been rescued if NASA had recognized that reentry was impossible. But that's far from clear. This article goes into fascinating detail about how difficult it would have been to prepare a rescue mission on time: https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue-plan-that-might-have-saved-space-shuttle-columbia/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue... One huge issue, beyond whether a rescue mission would've been possible, is whether it would've be ethical. If NASA knew that Columbia was stranded in orbit, then it would be knowingly sending a second crew up on a vehicle with the exact same potential problem, with no time to mitigate it. I'm sure a rescue crew would've volunteered despite the risks, but anyway the point is that "the slide that killed seven people" is erasing all of these questions.
- manquer 5y ago
  There are billion decisions in the road of design and operation of the shuttle that all contributed in some degree or other to the tragic outcome. This article is not attempting to answer that question, there is volume of literature on that. The primary thrust of the article is to highlight a common tool we use and how using it ineffectively can be dangerous, it does a good job of communicating that point effectively albeit with click baity title. I and most people here wouldn't understand tile design or shuttle engineering or ethics of space risks and not something we can learn from, it is rocket science after all, However crappy PowerPoint presentations we all use and consume and we could potentially improve communicating in our day to day professional lives even if though we don't do cool NASA kind of projects.
- andi999 5y ago
  Actually the Hubble repair mission STS 125 (after the Columbia accident) was planned with a rescue mission on standby. So NASA answered the question if they would think it were ethical. https://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/090508sts400/ https://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/090508sts400/
mltony 5y ago
Could it be that Boeing engineers made this presentation vague and confusing on purpose? I mean the article presumes that the engineers had poor PowerPoint skills, but it seems to me that this could have been cover-your-ass type of situation (also perhaps similar to Challenger disaster story). I mean obviously Boeing engineers need to communicate to NASA their assessment of the situation, but they don't want to be blamed for any technical difficulties (e.g. if second shuttle would have to be launched to save the crew). So they think Columbia will probably be fine, but let's communicate our worries to NASA, but let's do that in deliberately vague and conspicuous language, in hope that NASA managers won't see the fine print.
etamponi 5y ago
Wow, 7 lifes at stake and still managers can decide to "skip smaller text" because if it is smaller it is definitely less important... I agree: it's an awful slide. But the information was there. And I can imagine that the engineers were asked to assemble that presentation in a couple days, so I'd be surprised if they could do anything better. I agree: an outsider would not understand a word of that slide. So what? What was the audience of that presentation? Why did the audience not read the slide / documentation beforehand? Why was it not understandable by them? Again: the point here is the stakes. Would I read such a presentation for my day-to-day work? Probably not. Would I read it until I understand every single word if there were 7 lifes at stake? OF COURSE! Would I try to understand the engineers that had to assemble a comprehensive and credible document in a matter of days, and do my part of the work? If it was my day-to-day job, probably not. If there were 7 lifes at stake? OF COURSE. So yeah, terrible slide. Don't try to justify people not reading it, though.
Dove 5y ago
Powerpoint doesn't communicate badly. People communicate badly.

368 points by tk75x 5y ago

The original article by Edward Tufte which is referenced by this blog post can be found here: https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...

MattGaiser 5y ago

In general, we give people too much of a pass for not bothering to read what they are supposed to (and I myself am guilty of this as it seems like it preparedness for meetings is useless as nobody else reads even on the rare occasions I do speak). That is part of the reason Powerpoint is everywhere. You cannot assume that people have read anything before the meeting, you cannot assume they will read during the meeting, so you need to read it out loud to have a decent chance of it being received. I am also not thrilled accepting the use of titles and formatting as a excuse to skim 100 words. It is just the refusal to read/comprehend on a smaller scale.

carlmr 5y ago
As the communicator your job is to ensure that the audience gets your message. This slide is so comically bad that I wouldn't expect anyone to understand the gravity of the situation after seeing it. If this was a presentation done in high school they would have gotten a failing grade. And I think we can expect more from university educated people.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  I get this viewpoint pragmatically as nothing is going to change, but my point is that we can expect utterly nothing from the audience and excuse their refusal to do anything beyond accept Twitter feed like input. If someone wrote "I approved the landing as the title of the slide did not seem alarming", that person would be resoundingly rebuked. That would be an outrageous official rationale and the person would be regarded as lazy and negligent. But that is practically what happened and what we excuse.
- Graffur 5y ago
  But it's not a high school presentation done for the sake of doing a presentation. It's not an audience who will review the performance. It's giving information to _professional_ _experts_ who are _responsible_ for consuming that information.
  - carlmr 5y ago
    >it's not a high school presentation I agree, we can expect more from the presenters here. Experts are humans, experts get bored, experts can't necessarily follow your bad presentation. Underneath it all we're smart monkeys, not robots. You can't force yourself to pay attention indefinitely. It's not in our biology. No matter how smart you are if you hear hours of presentations in a day, you will only take home a certain maximum amount of the stuff that seemed important. If you're a presenter, and you have something life-and-death important to say, you should repeat it, you should put it into simple words, you should use appropriate language, voice and maybe even pictures to make it clear.
    - Graffur 5y ago
      Experts are human but it is their responsibility to not get bored in an important presentation regardless of the presenter. That responsibility means the fault is assigned to them and not the presenter. I agree with your last paragraph but after any bad event you could point at the presenter and say "I didn't consume the information they were providing - therefore blame them not me"
      - carlmr 5y ago
        I would still maintain that only because you're an expert you don't have superhuman abilities of controlling your attention/boredom. You say we can't absolve the experts from responsibility here, but it appears you want to absolve the presenters of any kind of responsibility. Why do these experts need superhuman focus abilities while the presenters needn't even have the presentation skills of 8th graders? But in the end we should maybe change the format of conveying information completely, whoever is to blame here.
brimble 5y ago
> That is part of the reason Powerpoint is everywhere. You cannot assume that people have read anything before the meeting, you cannot assume they will read during the meeting, so you need to read it out loud to have a decent chance of it being received. I've been told—very seriously—by multiple management consultants that public and private sector executives alike won't read a damn thing unless it shows up in powerpoint format, and even then you have to walk them through point by point or they'll miss most of it. This, when the documents are coming from people they're paying tons of money specifically to tell them stuff. The company in question (you've heard of them, if you've heard of any management consulting companies at all) quite literally had an off-shored office dedicated to producing PowerPoints decks from notes overnight, while everyone on an actual engagement was sleeping. The primary tangible output of an engagement, as I understand it, is, overwhelmingly, PowerPoint decks. It's the Final Draft of the upper-end management world—apparently, you'll be dismissed and lose face if you show up with anything else, or even send something else in an email.
- wil421 5y ago
  100% believable. I know someone who is a COO of a smaller company by employee count but very high revenue. They literally pay an offshore company to produce basic bullet points overnight based on notes.
- db48x 5y ago
  It’s not like that everywhere. Apparently at Amazon, the first 20–30 minutes of any meeting are dedicated to reading and taking notes on a memo, then the rest of the time can be spent discussing the contents of that memo. This ensures that nobody has to sit through any presentations, and also that everyone actually has time to read an in–depth document with the information that they actually need for every single meeting that they attend. I wouldn’t want to give up engineering, but I think that sounds like something I could put up with if someone forced me to be an executive.
giantg2 5y ago
No love for anyone questioning NASA on here. This will probably get downvoted to. I mean, NASA is the one who called in the vendor engineers to answer questions they had. If you didn't get answers to those questions, or if the answers weren't clear enough for you, then NASA needs communicate that. You can't get the information you want if you don't ask the questions. Everyone here is blaming a slide deck (that had the information on it!) instead of asking how NASA could have ignored that information. Slide formatting is a pitiful excuse for lack of due diligence by the recipients of that briefing - the people responsible for the safety of the at-risk personnel.

gabrielsroka 5y ago

How about death by a tiny gray serif font?

deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
folkrav 5y ago
The size looks the exact same as this very site to me. It's #5e5e5e (effective, as it's actually a slightly transparent RGBa value) against #fff, so a contrast ratio of 6.48:1, well within WCAG AA standards, and a tiny, slight shift to #595959 would be enough to meet AAA.
- gabrielsroka 5y ago
  Chrome Lighthouse on both mobile and desktop said that TFA did not have a sufficient contrast ratio. It doesn't look too bad on my desktop, but on my Android which is set to 130% it's almost unreadable. I had to use reader mode. And it doesn't resize on mobile, probably because they're using px in their CSS instead of em or something scalable.
  - folkrav 5y ago
    You were specifically speaking about serif grey text on white, which is pretty much what I just told you - WCAG AA compliant. [1] You weren't talking about Lighthouse nor mobile specifically, so I just answered with whatever info you gave out. [1] https://i.imgur.com/SF5WTCa.png https://i.imgur.com/SF5WTCa.png
ARandomerDude 5y ago
The more this comment gets downvoted, the more it looks like death by tiny gray serif font, making the comment quite funny.

zomg 5y ago

this is why whenever i write slides, each slide gets a title and a subheading. the subheading provides the implication of the slide and its contents. done properly, one could read the heading and subtitle of each slide and never need to look at the contents, unless some specific detail is desired/needed.

sklargh 5y ago

I give Tufte's (admittedly imperfect) thoughts on this deck and David Foster Wallace's This is Water (https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/ https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/) to every new member of my team to read and make it apparent that I expect them to have command of each document's implications.

jquery 5y ago
Losing DFW is such a tragedy for mankind. Are there any living thinkers on his level?
- sklargh 5y ago
  Not in the literary space.

junon 5y ago

Fascinating, I'm familiar with the incident but never heard this aspect of it.

giantg2 5y ago

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, but that they didn't know the extent. "NASA felt the engineers didn’t know what would happen but that all data pointed to there not being enough damage to put the lives of the crew in danger." If you thought they didn't know, then ask them what they do know! It's right on the slide that flight conditions are outside of test parameters and that the mass of the projectile was much higher. How the F do you work at NASA and not understand the basic principles of mass, velocity, and energy well enough for that to stand out enough to ask questions or run your own calculations... The reason the slide is laid out the way it is, is because it's describing the thought process and creates a deductive argument for how they got to their concern. This is a presentation for a briefing for other engineers, not a conference or sales pitch. It's supposed to be formal and contain the synopsis of technical points. Using projectors for technical briefings predates the use of PowerPoint. I see nothing wrong with the layout in that context. Edit: why downvote without a reply? NASA has a history of blaming vendors when they screw up. This looks like another example to me. The presentation format does not have any issues given the setting and target audience.

dekhn 5y ago
You're being downvoted because the entire process that lead to this decision has been massively analyzed and the root causes were determined.
- giantg2 5y ago
  And was it determined that this slide killed 7 people, as claimed in the title? That seems overly dramatic and ignores the other root causes.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    No, it wasn't this slide.

dmix 5y ago

> this foam, falling nine times faster than a fired bullet Wouldn’t the foam initially be travelling as fast as the spacecraft? So it’s just the time between it’s release and hitting the wing to accelerate.

giantg2 5y ago
Yep, that's why the test speed estimates 200 fps. There's no mention of if the incident velocity is similar to the test velocity though.
csours 5y ago
The foam accelerated down and the spacecraft accelerated up.
wdurden 5y ago
Don't dare try to question the narrative with physics and science. A Feynman and an O ring in ice water or a Tufte on visualizations will always be hired in at certain levels. For heaven's sake never go down the rabbit hole about how often the shuttles lost heat tiles. It was the foam, unforeseen and unforeseeable.
- wdurden 5y ago
  Oh, but yes, that PP slide was bad. Symantic's More on a Mac Plus would have allowed a better job 15 years earlier.
CommieBobDole 5y ago
That's correct. The CAIB report says it was traveling at a relative speed of "625 to 840 feet per second" at the time of impact. Which technically is the speed of a bullet, but just barely. Nowhere near nine times. http://s3.amazonaws.com/akamai.netstorage/anon.nasa-global/CAIB/CAIB_lowres_full.pdf http://s3.amazonaws.com/akamai.netstorage/anon.nasa-global/C...

stuff4ben 5y ago

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 talking points. And I've seen image-heavy decks that really don't convey anything either.

brimble 5y ago
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 these documents look. The US military and any big businesses that work heavily with them are infamous for this. They routinely produce some comically terrible decks and graphics. I wouldn't be surprised if that weird, seemingly-intentionally-hard-to-read style is also present in at least some parts of NASA, especially up at the administration level.
- stuff4ben 5y ago
  Been there, and unfortunately had to participate in that. Execs sometimes have a hard time conveying information, so PPT to the rescue! I want to blame management schools for their over-reliance on PPT, but in all honestly, it's hard to teach people to be good communicators.
- treesknees 5y ago
  At a previous job, my favorite to see were the ones with 3 slides. It was like nobody could communicate information without powerpoint. 1. Title slide with company logo 2. Content slide with 2 or 3 bullet points 3. Closing/thank you slide with contact info
- conductr 5y ago

magpi3 5y ago

I just realized that more time has passed since the Columbia Shuttle disaster (19 years), then passed between the Columbia and Challenger disasters (17 years). That seems impossible to me. I remember reading each of the astronaut's bios after the Columbia disaster, and the same thought kept echoing in my head: what a tragedy, what a waste. Seven remarkably talented people. I had no idea until I read this article how easily their deaths could have been avoided.

ApolloFortyNine 5y ago
>Seven remarkably talented people. I had no idea until I read this article how easily their deaths could have been avoided. In reality, there was likely nothing that could have been done once the damage occurred. Example source (form the 3 months after the disaster) here [1]. At the time no space shuttle was kept ready to launch for rescue (though this changed after this disaster) and their options here were limited. A common thought is 'just dock at the ISS' but the shuttle didn't have the fuel to reach it (future flights would ensure they were in the same plane to be able to dock there). A more in depth review years later(with a summary here [2]) did find that it may have actually been possible to launch another shuttle in time, but it would have had to have skipped safety checks, and importantly, launch with a known issue on board (the foam strike possibility). And even then, the rescue mission would have had to gone off without a hitch, because even in the absolutely bare minimum amount of time required, the Columbia crew would have been dangerously low on oxygen. [1] https://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/030430save/#:~:text=The%20answer%2C%20according%20to%20a,ship%20and%20its%20seven%20astronauts https://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts107/030430save/#:~.... [2] https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue-plan-that-might-have-saved-space-shuttle-columbia/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue...

gmiller123456 5y ago

Kinda pointless to show the slide without the audio of the presenter to go with it. Unless we're thinking the presenter just read the slide verbatim with no extra context, and no questions were asked, which would essentially defeat the purpose of having a presenter and audience present at the same time. I know I've seen presenters actually do that, but the author didn't provide any indication that that's what happened here.

300bps 5y ago
The audio of the presenter would add additional context but the PowerPoint presentation is objectively bad. It’s a wall of text. It should have had a single sentence in bold giant font: WE HAVE NEVER TESTED AN INSULATION COLLISION AT ANYTHING CLOSE TO THIS LEVEL
whartung 5y ago
Well, that's kind of the point. The people making the decisions, whether they listened to the presentation or not, perhaps gave too much credence to what was on the slide. The audio portion is temporal, even if recorded. You're there in the moment listening, but it doesn't necessarily last. But the slide is "eternal". Always there to be referenced, or passed along. The slide was going to be viewed repeatedly over a longer time frame. Biasing the memory of those who may have been at the presentation, and serving as a "single" source of truth for those who did not. As much as PP is meant to be a visual AID, most folks are actually pretty lousy at using it that way, and PP has morphed, even if unintentionally, as an artifact of record. I'm as guilty as the next guy wanting to skim the PP deck rather than listening to the presentation. I can skim a deck in 5m, vs sitting for 60m listening. Similarly for technical papers. Read the intro, the summary, skip to the end, read the conclusion. Only if any of what I read is actually interesting will I dig deeper in to the paper.
- thrwy_918 5y ago
  > Similarly for technical papers. Read the intro, the summary, skip to the end, read the conclusion. This isn't an appropriate comparison. The purpose of the conclusion is to present the findings of the paper, whereas the purpose of presentation slides is not (or at least, should not be) to summarize the content of the presentation.

jimmaswell 5y ago

> This allowed NASA managers to imply a hierarchy of importance in their head: the writing lower down and in smaller font was ignored These managers were REALLY that braindead? These are NASA managers in charge of life-or-death decisions, and their dull eyes glaze over as spittle puddles underneath them because they're too stupid to read one whole entire paragraph worth of text without ignoring subheadings because they "don't look important"? I hope they're happy with the result of their childish intellectual laziness.

throwthere 5y ago
I think it’s getting at cognitive bias more than intellect
einpoklum 5y ago
> These managers were REALLY that braindead? These are NASA managers in charge of life-or-death decisions If you're in charge of 10000 life-or-death decisions, and are on a tight schedule, you are unlikely to give each of them its proper attention.
- Chris2048 5y ago
  This doesn't sound like a normal decision, but a rather big one. Also, after 9,999 decisions, I'd expect you to be pretty good at picking out what's important.
- Graffur 5y ago
  It's still their fault and not the person who created the slide.

tgflynn 5y ago

> There were a number of options. The astronauts could perform a spacewalk and visually inspect the hull. NASA could launch another Space Shuttle to pick the crew up. Or they could risk re-entry. That's not how I remember it being presented to the public. The official word at the time was that there were no feasible rescue options. Yes, they could have done a spacewalk to inspect the damage but if it had been bad there still wasn't anything that could have been done. I think the main problem with launching a rescue mission was the time it took NASA to get a shuttle ready for launch.

giantg2 5y ago
I agree. I think there is a disconnect on what was known at the time vs what this retrospective article is assuming was known at the time.
gambiting 5y ago
Yeah I definitely remember reading a full analysis about what would be required to actually launch a second shuttle in time to rescue them, and it would require nothing less than war effort for an operation never attempted before, and of which literally every single part would have to work first try, with no delays, and even then there was barely enough time to do it.
- hbn 5y ago
  If this is true then it's increasingly bold of this article's author to blame the deaths of 7 astronauts on a single engineer for not getting the information hierarchy correct on a powerpoint
  - gambiting 5y ago
    I think this is the right summary: https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue-plan-that-might-have-saved-space-shuttle-columbia/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue... Basically yeah, it could have been done, but only by pulling out one of the other shuttles out of active maintanance, skipping a whole bunch of repairs and necessary checks, launching in record time, and actually managing a situation where there are two shuttles in orbit, something NASA wasn't exactly prepared for at the time. And the biggest question of all - what if the second shuttle becomes damaged in the exact same way on the way up? That's not to say that NASA shouldn't have at least attempted a rescue. Knowing anything about the way US approaches situations like this, it would have been a "no expenses spared" effort and they would at least try. But unfortunately it's extremely likely that the second shuttle would have also been lost on the way, with crucial maintenance and checks skipped just to make it space worthy in time.

codeflo 5y ago

Linked from Tufte’s article, I found this interesting comment from someone’s experience at Microsoft: [1] > Attempting to have slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts makes for bad visuals and bad documentation. Yet, this is a typical, acceptable approach. PowerPoint (or Keynote) is a tool for displaying visual information, information that helps you tell your story, make your case, or prove your point. PowerPoint is a terrible tool for making written documents, that's what word processors are for. I think that’s on point for many companies. A lot of the terrible slides you see in meetings are actually intended as documentation after the fact, and few people recognize (or care) that this makes for a terrible presentation. Ironically, I think Powerpoint isn’t such a bad tool for creating handouts. If the intended reader reads the document on their screen instead of printing it, a nice PDF with screen-shaped pages might actually be close to optimal. You just have to be 100% clear whether you’re creating a document or a presentation. [1] http://mamamusings.net/archives/2005/11/19/the_culture_of_the_deck.php http://mamamusings.net/archives/2005/11/19/the_culture_of_th...

rahimnathwani 5y ago
"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.
- sosborn 5y ago
  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.
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    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.

csours 5y ago

You don't see the cultural assumptions in the slide. You don't see why defensive phrasing is used. You don't see the recriminations that people have gone through in the past. One slide and bad culture killed seven people.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

I don't buy the title. This is not just a normal, routine presentation. This is an all hands on deck emergency and discussion. And NASA isn't just a bunch of MBA's, but rather people who have spent their entire careers immersed in this kind of stuff. No matter what is one the slide, I expect that the audience asks detailed questions. Even if the slide has just a big thumbs up emoji, I suspect you would still get a lot of really hard questions. Think about presentations on programming, where someone in the audience points out that the example code on the slide is incorrect/won't compile/undefined behavior I would expect a bunch of geeks (which I think would be there at NASA) to scrutinize the slide and try to find any flaw in the logic. Especially when the lives of people they deeply care about are on the line. If they are so cavalier about human life that they just skip the details of the slide while making literal life and death decisions, it speaks of a very deep culture rot that goes far beyond PowerPoint.

conductr 5y ago
> I don't buy the title. IDK. I too like to think the discourse and Q&A would have signaled differently than the slide. But, this is also 2003 and people generally had not gotten great at communicating via powerpoint yet. It's still bad now, it was horrible then. A unformatted list of bullet points was obviously still an acceptable slide format which tells me a good deal of how much slide skillz these folks utilized. So, I do believe the slide title. I feel like it could have just as easily been discussed prior to the slide, it was agreed the test was acceptable or risk was low, and so the title was just trying to indicate that "it's been pre-agreed there is no problem here" then outlines some of the concerns which were considered.

commandlinefan 5y ago

> Imagine if the engineers had put up a slide with just: “foam strike more than 600 times bigger than test data.” Then they would have been fired unceremoniously and replaced with engineers that knew better than to make their bosses look bad. (who themselves would then, of course, been held responsible for apparently preventable deaths). Stop blaming the engineers for this stuff. This is the fault of the timeline chasers.

einpoklum 5y ago
> Then they would have been fired unceremoniously and replaced with engineers that knew better than to make their bosses look bad More engineers need to risk this and raise red flags, publicly, about potential lethal faults. Yes, you will suffer if you get fired; but our education as engineers (if I may include myself among those ranks despite being a software guy...) must be such that we would find _not_ raising the red flag shameful and despicable. So much so that it would seem far worse than losing one's job.

ModernMech 5y ago

I have an issue with the title of this piece. PowerPoint did not kill anyone. There are good people out there writing PowerPoint, and they should never be made to feel like their presentation software is responsible for seven people dying tragically. This was an engineering failure and a communication failure, but cannot and should not be laid at the feet of PowerPoint. Alternative title: death by ears, how failing to listen and communicate killed seven people.

yummybear 5y ago

A question I often ask myself (though I don't work with anything with actual human risk) - when are my concerns valid and when am I coming off as just having a bleak outlook. My own personal experience is that it's easier to be concerned with the small things (we have to have naming conventions), than with big things (are we building the right thing). I think there is a tendency to think "it'll probably work out".

rhema 5y ago

Tufte isn't exactly wrong, but the way he writes has so much certainty in it. In reality, the design choices people make in the media they use has as much to do with social norms and culture as what really works. Alternatives like Prezi exist, but are not really going to be accepted in formal presentations https://infovisu.com/assets/pubs/linder2015beyond.pdf https://infovisu.com/assets/pubs/linder2015beyond.pdf . If you really bring me a physical piece of paper today, I doubt I would be able to keep track of it.

ssivark 5y ago
As cool as it might look, does Prezi actually solve any real problem/need in information presentation? The spatial & hierarchical organization of the presentation feels very gimmicky for 99% of the presentations where it is absolutely irrelevant.

Veedrac 5y ago

The first step they went wrong is using a slideshow in the first place. This was a time critical scenario, anyone who needed to be making decisions should have been part of the engineering discussions from the beginning. They should have been having interactive conversations going over what they knew and how they knew it. The engineers had no time to be making slides for a management and that wasn't interested enough to be in the room with them in the first place. Slides make sense as a way to introduce the outline of concept to a broad audience in a way that requires much less effort than 1-on-1 discussions. They are not a means for coming to decisions. If you need to make a critical, life- and business-shaping decision off the back of a side deck, you should instead delegate the decision to someone who knows more than you.

D13Fd 5y ago

PowerPoint is not the problem, it's poor presentation of information. Yes, you can de-emphasize information in a powerpoint presentation, just like you could with a chalkboard, overhead slides, or any other way of presenting information to a group. So what?

arrow7000 5y ago
Yes that was the point. Nobody is blaming PowerPoint the program.

areoform 5y ago

The article doesn't do the slides nor the evidence justice. It might be more illustrative to study the original article by Edward Tufte, which the writer (and I) learned about the issue from, https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0001yB-2238.gif https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0001yB-2238.gif https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0001yB-2239.gif https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0001yB-2239.gif I think it's why I think teaching engineers how to draw and do good design is important. How big is a cubic inch? How big is the crater in the heat shield that we're talking about? It would have been better to draw comparisons and explore things. Here's a simple sentence that could have done better; "Sir, our test database was for objects the size of an average icecube. The thing that hit the wing was the size of seven and a half footballs. It's 640x larger! [chart that shows just how much kinetic energy we're talking about] We're looking at somewhere between 640x to 1000x more energy than we've ever seen. We have a problem." A friend and I did an interview with Don Eyles a while ago and he said something that haunts me, "if you see something, say something" https://twitter.com/_areoform/status/1501589762599112704 https://twitter.com/_areoform/status/1501589762599112704 I'd like to go a bit further. If you see something, design and explain something. Challenger is a great example of this; Dr Tufte covers it extremely well, just laying out the boosters and the blowthrough they experienced from left to right on a chart that has temperature as the X axis, you can see clearly that it gets worse as the temperature drops. But no one at NASA or Thiokol thought about doing that. No one thought about humanizing the data. They knew how important it was. They tried to say something. But they couldn't express it. It's not enough to just show people the data. We need to get people to understand it. And that's often social suicide. It's easy for people to want to remain stuck in their status quo, no one likes the "negative person", but that's what ends up getting people killed in safety critical environments. And that's how we get messes like the ones we're in today. One particular one that comes to mind is climate change, I am unsure if most people are aware of this, but it's very similar to the failure expressed here. Most of the scientists whose work is consumed by the IPCC and the models that are published by the IPCC know that the "consensus" is wrong. Except, it's wrong in the opposite direction to what certain people want it to be. The reality is far worse than what the models suggest. The models still don't include the loss of permafrost - what's worse is that they don't model the non-linearity of permafrost loss, methane emission, that then sparks more warming and more permafrost loss etc, https://www.woodwellclimate.org/review-of-permafrost-science-in-ipccs-ar6-wg1/ https://www.woodwellclimate.org/review-of-permafrost-science... nor do they include effects of how the climate would change of ocean conveyor currents shut down (AMOC in particular is of significant interest, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/12/concern-grows-over-atlantic-ocean-conveyor-belt-shutdown https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/12/concern-grows-over... ). They also don't model the melting and release of clathrates from the ocean, or the effects of ocean acidification, and several other non-linear processes. I had a very polite, but heated argument with one of the scientists involved and he told me that they aren't going to include that, because if they do, the numbers will look much worse and they'll be dismissed as apocalyptic loons. Which brings us, elegantly, back to the point that Dr Feynman made in his remarks about the Challenger disaster, "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

andi999 5y ago

So what would have been a (realistic) alternative instead of trying to reenter the athmosphere with a broken tile?

dqpb 5y ago

In my experience, it's nearly impossible to convey information so accurately that the the receiver is likely to make the same decision you would make. There is a simple low-effort high-information solution to this problem - have everyone vote (or bet) on the decision. This, more than anything else, will reveal whether or not you've reached understanding/consensus/alignment. (This is not to say that the final decision should be made by voting, rather it's to gauge the level of consensus)

bambax 5y ago

> Imagine if the engineers had put up a slide with just: “foam strike more than 600 times bigger than test data.” Maybe NASA would have listened. Maybe they wouldn’t have attempted re-entry. Yes. This proves PowerPoint isn't to blame per se, but how it was used.

subhro 5y ago

Three kickass books I found very helpful in improving my slide-foo and hold the attention of my audience: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596522347/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596522347/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470632011/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470632011/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1101980168/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1101980168/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... If you only have time to go through 1 book, I would recommend Slide:ology.

rhacker 5y ago

The title is wrong - it didn't kill 7 people. And it is stated in the article that it "helped" kill 7 people, but even that is a leap. For all we know the slide actually reduced the percentage chance of this happening by .0001%. We can't actually know. We might as well blame it on the guy that was in charge of the foam order but had an extra extra long poop in the morning that reduced his work hours that day and he ordered 24 minutes to late and in those 24 minutes it caused other companies to get foam orders in first and a really good mixture batch came out and the next was sub-par and that's what the shuttle got. Basically chaos theory.

karaterobot 5y ago
Are you just saying that the powerpoint slide didn't literally kill the people, the explosion did?
arrow7000 5y ago
Yeah. So why not walk off a cliff? Who knows what will happen when you walk off a cliff? It's impossible to know. Chaos theory and all that.

CountDrewku 5y ago

elfrinjo 5y ago

If you are impressed by this, wait until you see Colin Powell's Iraq slides

paulpauper 5y ago

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

anonu 5y ago

I would be peeved at the typos in the slide. That seems sloppy if youre dealing with this kind of work.

dang 5y ago

Related: Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19668161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19668161 - April 2019 (127 comments) Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24115837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24115837 - Aug 2020 (1 comment)

zardo 5y ago

Is the implication that the slide was presented without discussion? You can't judge a presentation based on the accompanying visual aids without considering the verbal content.

PaulHoule 5y ago

Diane Vaughn's The Challenger Launch Decision misattributes responsibility for the disaster to the meeting in which a similar slide was shown. When the shuttle design was finalized in the late 1970s they knew it had a 2-3% chance of a hull loss per launch. They were still planning to launch it 50 times a year so that would have meant losing a shuttle and crew every year! The shuttle had hundreds of critical flaws and that 'normalization of deviance' meeting at which slides like this were shown at was a routine part of each shuttle launch. For each of these unacceptable situations they had to convince themselves that, with some mitigation (or not), they could accept it. It was inevitable that something like this was going to happen and then there would be recriminations about the details of that meeting. Every other crewed space vehicle had an escape system to get the crew away from a failed rocket. The Challenger crew survived the explosion but were killed when the reinforced crew section hit the ocean. Similarly the Colombia astronauts were killed by a thermal protection system that was "unsafe at any speed". When the first few shuttles were launched there was a huge amount of concern about tiles breaking and coming off. Once they'd dodged the bullet a few times they assumed it was alright but it wasn't... In the literature "normalization of deviance" has turned from a formal process used in managing dangerous technology to incidents such as: surgeon takes a crap and goes to work without washing his hands, forklift operator smokes pot and operates, etc.

dr_orpheus 5y ago
You can broadly say that both Challenger and Columbia disasters can be attributed to failures in communication. But the Rogers Commission Report (presidential commission for investigating Challenger) doesn't really show quite the same scenario. At the Flight Readiness Review for the solid rocket boosters before launch the engineers of Morton Thiokol (the solid rocket booster manufacturer) objected to launch because of the detrimental effect of the cold temperatures on the o-rings in the solid rocket boosters. They had never launched in that cold of temperatures before and previous test data had shown erosion of the seals on previous flights. These concerns were not communicated by the Morton Thiokol management or NASA present at that flight readiness review to any of the higher level managers that got final approval on launch. For Challenger it was a known issue and people specifically said "don't do this". [0] https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v1ch5.htm https://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v1ch5.htm

vjust 5y ago

That powerpoint is truly opaque. The culture of work that resulted in that powerpoint being used hopefully is no more. I wonder if one can connect that to the Boeing Max disaster. We don't need Tufte and his subtle points to see this was an abominable piece of communication. More important, would be the question "is it safe to call out a bull shit slide in a corporate meeting". We hear of how Bezos or Jobs would be rude and obnoxious to their employees when something was not laid out clearly. This, on the other hand is where politeness takes us.

shashurup 5y ago

I still cannot get why was it a big deal to go outside and check the tile?

beeforpork 5y ago

Very interesting! I will start my future presentations with 'The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint...' :-) But this '...has grown exponentially...' is just such BS. sigh I just cannot get used to this expression entering lay language.

nickdothutton 5y ago

PPT as it is used, or any similar software performing the same function, as used in the same way, is a cancer.

sumanthvepa 5y ago

I’ve seen a lot of management consulting decks, and they tend to be very information dense. But a lot of effort is put into making sure that the each slide conveys exactly the message that the consultant wants to convey. Also the slides are designed to be read and used outside of the actual presentation, often as reference material.

oconnor663 5y ago

The title presumed that the crew could have been rescued if NASA had recognized that reentry was impossible. But that's far from clear. This article goes into fascinating detail about how difficult it would have been to prepare a rescue mission on time: https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue-plan-that-might-have-saved-space-shuttle-columbia/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue... One huge issue, beyond whether a rescue mission would've been possible, is whether it would've be ethical. If NASA knew that Columbia was stranded in orbit, then it would be knowingly sending a second crew up on a vehicle with the exact same potential problem, with no time to mitigate it. I'm sure a rescue crew would've volunteered despite the risks, but anyway the point is that "the slide that killed seven people" is erasing all of these questions.

manquer 5y ago
There are billion decisions in the road of design and operation of the shuttle that all contributed in some degree or other to the tragic outcome. This article is not attempting to answer that question, there is volume of literature on that. The primary thrust of the article is to highlight a common tool we use and how using it ineffectively can be dangerous, it does a good job of communicating that point effectively albeit with click baity title. I and most people here wouldn't understand tile design or shuttle engineering or ethics of space risks and not something we can learn from, it is rocket science after all, However crappy PowerPoint presentations we all use and consume and we could potentially improve communicating in our day to day professional lives even if though we don't do cool NASA kind of projects.
andi999 5y ago
Actually the Hubble repair mission STS 125 (after the Columbia accident) was planned with a rescue mission on standby. So NASA answered the question if they would think it were ethical. https://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/090508sts400/ https://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/090508sts400/

mltony 5y ago

Could it be that Boeing engineers made this presentation vague and confusing on purpose? I mean the article presumes that the engineers had poor PowerPoint skills, but it seems to me that this could have been cover-your-ass type of situation (also perhaps similar to Challenger disaster story). I mean obviously Boeing engineers need to communicate to NASA their assessment of the situation, but they don't want to be blamed for any technical difficulties (e.g. if second shuttle would have to be launched to save the crew). So they think Columbia will probably be fine, but let's communicate our worries to NASA, but let's do that in deliberately vague and conspicuous language, in hope that NASA managers won't see the fine print.

etamponi 5y ago

Wow, 7 lifes at stake and still managers can decide to "skip smaller text" because if it is smaller it is definitely less important... I agree: it's an awful slide. But the information was there. And I can imagine that the engineers were asked to assemble that presentation in a couple days, so I'd be surprised if they could do anything better. I agree: an outsider would not understand a word of that slide. So what? What was the audience of that presentation? Why did the audience not read the slide / documentation beforehand? Why was it not understandable by them? Again: the point here is the stakes. Would I read such a presentation for my day-to-day work? Probably not. Would I read it until I understand every single word if there were 7 lifes at stake? OF COURSE! Would I try to understand the engineers that had to assemble a comprehensive and credible document in a matter of days, and do my part of the work? If it was my day-to-day job, probably not. If there were 7 lifes at stake? OF COURSE. So yeah, terrible slide. Don't try to justify people not reading it, though.

Dove 5y ago

Powerpoint doesn't communicate badly. People communicate badly.