As someone who until recently was a working scientist, all this anti-Powerpoint, pro-Tufte talk on the interwebs just seems weird and out-of-touch. Powerpoint/Keynote is absolutely central to modern science, just as overhead slides were before Powerpoint/Keynote came along. Powerpoint can be used well or badly. And most scientists don't really have the time or inclination to obsess over whether their data is being presented as beautifully as possible. That strikes me more as a fetish of people who aren't actually doing science.<p>And if you think that scientists aren't trying to convince you of something, you're just being silly---they're trying to convince you of whatever it is they think they've discovered. My impression is that this is usually done in good faith, and in an intellectually honest way, but still, they're 100% trying to convince you of something. If they're not, they're not really doing their job, which is to discover new things and convince other people that what they've discovered is true.<p>It seems like most "anti-PowerPoint" sentiment is actually anti-bullet-list sentiment. In which case, maybe its proponents should just say that.