A PowerPoint diagram meant to portray the complexity of American strategy in Afghanistan certainly succeeded in that aim.

This article from the New York Times is certainly a must read for engineers.

Here are a couple of salient points from the article:

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina.  (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

and:

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

To abstract that a little bit (okay, maybe alot), the point could be made that our (mis)understanding of the circumstances of the world could partly be attributed to the middle-man of technological prowess.  As a school science teacher, I am struck again and again at the way that technology (like calculators) can so easily mask ignorance.  Imagine, for a moment, that you asked a child to read a picture book with you, and he took out a cell phone to take a picture of each of the words then pronounced it for him, so he could read that to you.  This is what many of my students do in the process of solving physics problems.  They look for an equation that has all the variables they are given, then plug these mathematical steps into the calculator and write down what the calculator spits out.  They do so with no regard for how reasonable the number is.  There are elementary school children who, because of ubiquotous access, hide their mathematical ignorance behind their ability to punch keys in the calculator.

The first thing that came into my mind was, "do I rely too much on my technology to make sense for me?"

What comes to your mind when you read that article?