Who to believe?

I have just watched a video of Andrew Hughes Hallett giving a Guest Lecture at the University of Edinburgh. He is a respected and influential expert in economics. His theme was the economic feasibility of an independent Scotland.

Upon hearing that copies of his shorter Powerpoint had been distributed to the audience in advance, he produced a more detailed one for use during his lecture. This created a classic case of “death by Powerpoint”. He may be an expert economist and academic but he came over as a less than effective communicator.

This led to a playoff in my mind between the presentation and the content. There are four main options as set out below:

Situation 1: The ideal situation. It can be useful to team up an academic for the content and a journalist or educator to fine tune the presentation.

Situation 2: “Effective communication of misleading messages”. The misleading badness may or may not be wilful.

Situation 3:  “He must be very clever, I didn’t understand a thing he said.” Let the author and the presenter be different people.

Situation 4: Reschedule or give up. Recruit more suitable people.

SO – do I believe Andrew Hughes Hallett? Economics is not one of my specialities. If his target audience included me then he covered far too much ground in too short a time.

His personal demeanour put me off – he came across as a self satisfied and infallible senior academic who is sometimes consulted about real world problems – although he does not always get paid for it! But he gives the impression of being quite well on top of the literature and contemporary thinking so he might have his uses. I don’t know how many contending academics are in his specialist field. So I do not have enough information to have a reasoned belief. My gut reaction is negative and tainted with antipathy towards central belt academics.
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Spare quotes:

• Goethe reckoned of poets that “they stir their waters that they might appear deep”.
• Einstein reckoned that "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." and "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."
• Danny Griffiths reckoned that “an expert is someone who knows the same as you but is more organised and has slides”. (Update = “has a Powerpoint”.)