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And in an age when most people squirm if they must sit still to listen to a person speak for longer than a minute, PowerPoint keeps them calm. Its soothing, assuaging underlying message is that there’s no topic too complex, no problem too difficult, no idea too subtle that ordinary human beings can’t grasp it in a 20-minute presentation. PowerPoint runs roughshod over phenomena by flattening them, so that nothing is more important than anything else.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon have found that groups have a high collective intelligence when members of a group are good at reading each others’ emotions — when they take turns speaking, when the inputs from each member are managed fluidly, when they detect each others’ inclinations and strengths.