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mcdreeamie-musings
Personal blog · mcdreeamiemusings.com/bloghealthhistory
mcdreeamie-musings is a personal blog at mcdreeamiemusings.com about health and history. Since 2019, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (7) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog's post on slide-based presentations and communication failures, citing it for the Columbia disaster slides and for Amazon's memo practice. One commenter calls it worth reading.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 7 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
MCDREEAMIE’S Meducational & MedHistorical Musings About Me
Most-linked posts?
- Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2020-08-11
What Hacker News says?
Speaking only of intrinsic and extraneous cognitive load oversimplifies things. This works for tasks of pilots (see e.g. NASATLX scores). However, if new information that needs to be learned is in the game there is also germane cognitive load [0]. It is a nice theory, however, practically there is unfortunately no easy way to separate them and look at them totally independently. [0] https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blo…
Comment linking /blog/2019/10/15/the-good-the-bad-and-the-can-be-ugly-the-three-parts-of-cognitive-load
on “Cognitive load is what matters”Submitted Death by PowerPoint: The slide that killed seven people as a story · 387 points
HN discussionhttps://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd... Is worth reading in a similar vein - Death by PowerPoint.
Comment linking /blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd7w2t2mtvfg81uhx
on “The day Steve Jobs dissed me in a keynote (2010)”Submitted Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019) as a story · 368 points
HN discussionIn-depth technical presentations were identified as a contributing factor to the Challenge crash. That's why Amazon's meetings have memos. https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd...
Comment linking /blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd7w2t2mtvfg81uhx
on “Figma Slides Is a Beautiful Disaster”Submitted The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and the over-reliance on PowerPoint (2019) as a story · 210 points
HN discussionI don't know about that. The slide the engineers sent to management for Columbia warning that the problem had never been simulated was, shall we say, not brimming with positivity. It just was incredibly unclear[0]. [0] https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd...
Comment linking /blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd7w2t2mtvfg81uhx
on “Concord had a dev culture of toxic positivity that halted any negative feedback”Submitted Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI don't know if I can point you to a PowerPoint presentation that did have a million man-hours of work on it, but here's a story about one that certainly didn't: https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd... Communication is communication, be it by PowerPoint or semaphore, and it takes talent to do it right. > I have never seen a presentation that couldn’t have been done just as well without the us…
Comment linking /blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd7w2t2mtvfg81uhx
on “Meta's Vision for Superintelligence”Submitted Bullet Holes and Bias: The Story of Abraham Wald as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThere's past evidence of that. Some link the 2003 Columbia disaster to a slide-based presentation format with insufficient/unclear information. https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd...
Comment linking /blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd7w2t2mtvfg81uhx
on “Dennis Austin, the software developer of PowerPoint, dies at 76”Not just for military: https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd... Turns out trying to contain a complex system within a simple system of abstractions is a trendline towards disaster for any enterprise.
Comment linking /blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd7w2t2mtvfg81uhx
on “SR-71 Blackbird Speed Check Story”
