Hacker News Reader

Tufte has done some neat stuff but his claim that Challenger (or even more tenuously, Columbia) were caused by bad powerpoint presentations strains credibility.

The problem wasn't that the right people didn't know the danger. The problem was that they had enormous political pressure on them to move forward, and they were able to discount the danger in their own minds and fail to stop the launch despite being informed.

Tufte's argument is a classic example of an expert placing too much importance on his specialty. In this case, the presentation of the data was, at worst, a second-order issue: the data themselves were enough for anyone prepared to listen.

Tufte's analysis covers the Columbia disaster in 2003.

A quick Google search turned up this excerpt of his analysis of the Challenger disaster (beginning on page 14).

https://blogs.stockton.edu/hist4690/files/2012/06/Edward-Tuf...

Yes, this is what I meant to reference. Thanks.

Ah, ok, Tufte also released an analysis of the PowerPoint decks analyzing the Columbia tile problems.

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint