[Sigia-l] IAs in Wall Street Journal

[Christopher Fahey [askrom]]

> Woh - now getting to the end of the article. Tufte and 
> Fraser agree that the PDB should be left the way it is,
> because re-designing it would put more responsibility 
> on the analyst or advisor who prepared it. 
> 
> Um - isn't that the job of an analyst or advisor? In my 
> experience, "management" wants as few details as 
> possible, or at least to have the most salient points 
> called out with supporting information in the
> background.

The PDB is only eleven pages long (the declassified version is only two
pages). Is it too much to ask that the American President carefully read
every word of an eleven page document every day? 

I'm in agreement with Tufte and Fraser here. The President doesn't need
flash cards or icons - he just needs to read his PDBs. And his staff
shouldn't have to design for the lowest common denominator,
short-attention-span, casual browser, etc. The job of the President's
advisors is to write a document of the appropriate length and level of
detail to permit the President to make decisions.

Good design is, of course, always a good idea, and there are lots of unique
and unsolved design challenges in the world. But the PDB is just a bunch of
paragraphs like millions of other books, articles, and documents, and it's
perfectly acceptable to expect the President of the United States to be able
to read a bunch of paragraphs in their entirety. This aint the butterfly
ballot, folks. It's just a document.

One would hope that the commander-in-chief of the United States would be
made of better stuff than the typical "management" person who needs things
bullet pointed for them. To coddle the president with bright colors and
number codes might actually be detrimental to his or her decision making:
The President should be making decisions based on more information than a
simple number or color, so perhaps Presidents should NOT be given shortcuts
that might suggest that the decisions facing them were simple and didn't
require background knowledge. If our current President really is only
capable of reading headlines and scanning icons -- or, more charitably, if
he really does prefer making bold decisions based on rapid scans of
headlines and boldface names -- then his advisors shouldn't bother with
writing long documents at all and should just show him a powerpoint slide
every day.

-Cf

[christopher eli fahey]
art: http://www.graphpaper.com
sci: http://www.askrom.com
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