It’s been several months since we brought you the travesty of the “US Counterinsurgency Diagram”, that has recently resurfaced as a great example of Bad Vis, but now it’s being used as a weapon against the military’s increased reliance on the scourge of presentation people everywhere: Microsoft PowerPoint.  Military commanders are increasingly spending hours a day creating these presentations, and they don’t enjoy it. When asked:

Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs.

Arguing that presentations unrealistically simplify the information and disguise complexities under simplistic bullet-points, I find this description incredibly accurate of my own experiences:

Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.

The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

via Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War – PowerPoint – NYTimes.com.