Edward Tufte and I...(2)

"No!" Edward Tufte snapped. "That's patronizing."

I had just suggested that despite his despite of PowerPoint, it might have its place, in reaching out to the illiterate and dyslexic. Tufte is quite literate himself. Any array of fewer than 100 figures he prefers to lay out in a simple table in Gill Sans, no rules, and let readers find the information they want. He relies on readers to find their information without fancy graphics.

But what if the reader can't read?

"They can read the sports pages, can't they?" Tufte said. I submit that non-readers do not read the sports pages, nor anything else. They consume their sports on television.

I still marvel that I talked to Tufte at all. His courses last Thursday and Friday in New York were sold out. I counted about 500 people on Thursday. He had no time for questions from the floor. Instead, he made himself available during lunch hour, when he surely would have preferred to eat, for "office hours."

I didn't convince Tufte, but my failure did not halt my train of thought. Susan Pinker writes that 8% of all males have dyslexia.

Two out of every three high school dropouts are male, and many of these dropouts
have learning disabilities, of which dyslexia is the most common.

Pinker writes in The Sexual Paradox (Scribner, 2008). This book pulled together subjects I had been musing over for a long time. Why are males more fragile? Why are more of them subject to autism-spectrum disorders? Why do more of them battle with psychosis?

I once worked with blue collar workers--men, to a one. When the rep from the 401(K) program visited to explain our benefits, he read the booklet to us, every word. I know that the men I worked with were intelligent, capable of installing complex systems. But I suspected that some of them could not read.

Tufte, meet Pinker. There may be a place for PowerPoint and speeches, even if literate people can read two or three times faster than they can process spoken speech. Not everyone is literate.

Mea culpa: in my last posting about Tufte I asked who could forget his graphic about Napoleon’s troops retreating from Moscow? I obviously remembered the graphic, but had forgotten that Tufte did not design it. It was laid out by Charles Joseph Minard.