To inform or to intimidate ?

"...When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war,' General Stanley McChrystal, the US and NATO force commander, ..." 




This reminds me of some of the papers and presentations in research community.  A power point slide would have so much details in there that it ends up overwhelming the audience instead of educating.  This is a result of poor authorship.  Either you don't understand your own material good enough to decide what is important and what is not (which reflects poorly on you) or you are not confident about your work and just overwhelming/intimidating people with such slides into believing that your work is good (which is even worse).  Oh there is another, equally sad, trick researchers in Engineering employ, i.e. to fill their presentation/paper with inane amount of math without providing enough intuition  and insight  behind it.  It serves only one purpose: impede the communication of the idea.




Goal of the presentation should be to inform and educate and not intimidate and overwhelm.   If you do your job well audience would be able to appreciate it.  But sadly that's not the case always.  In fact, I have seen the scenarios where people berated the idea because the presenter explained it very well.  Their argument being I understood it in 20 minutes so it may not me that difficult.  Seriously?  Instead of appreciating the author for job well done you gonna blame him for making things comprehensible.  They would be all impressed if you show some complicated (and unnecessary) math equations that might not make any sense at all unless you spend several hours at it.   As the saying goes... "if you can't convince them, confuse them." Using Math as the crutches is an old trick that has become a habit now.  I promised myself never to use math unless it is necessary in communicating the idea.