Amen. For more on that, see Edward Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint". It's no wonder Jeff Bezos insists on his subordinates bringing 2-3 page length essays, not slides, to decision meetings.
Regarding the first link, which (perhaps ironically) I've only skim-read: much of it seems to be attacking bad slideshows, rather than inherent problems with the format.
A slideshow isn't meant to be read in the absence of a speaker giving a presentation. It exists to support the speaker in their presentation. If the intent is to offer a resource which can act as a substitute for attending a presentation, a slideshow is an inappropriate choice.
A good lecture typically makes effective use of a slideshow. Lectures are mostly non-interactive, but this needs no apology, contrary to what the article seems to imply. Perhaps other kinds of presentations should be more interactive, but I don't see that non-interactivity is always a failing.
Similarly, a good slideshow can make effective use of bullet-points. Bullet-points don't always mean you're skipping over important detail, or that you've failed to properly structure the content.
> The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA
Right. A slideshow is not a substitute for a proper write-up, it's just a presentation aid.
In some contexts you might get away with not doing a formal write-up, but certainly not in a life-and-death context like the one mentioned in the article.
> For serious presentations, it will be useful to replace PowerPoint slides with paper handouts showing words, numbers, data graphics, images together.
I can see that might work well, but I can see this might degrade into just rewriting a technical paper to fit the flow of the presentation. It might make more sense to just say For more detail, see the formal paper. Certainly a slideshow is not a substitute for a proper paper, but even a handout will presumably lose some of what the full paper has to say. If the full information is already there in the paper, why not refer people to it?
Education, for around two thousand years, used to focus around training rhetorical excellence in all students. Relatively recently, it's become more affordable and practical than ever before to supplement rhetoric with written text.
Bullet points and visual aids are crutches that detract from the quality of a speech. However, our culture has this habit of sending adults completely unprepared into high pressure environments armed with what would have been seen as baby level waste-of-time education by any generation before the boomers.
PPTs are water wings for adults who would otherwise drown from the rational terror that they have about public speaking in a professional context. The problem is less related to the format and more related to the notion that it is kind to throw people into the deep end without training them how to swim. It's not a coincidence that most people are terrified of public speaking: it's hard, it's high stakes, and it requires a lot of practice to become comfortable with.
