Hierarchical Bullets Bury Uncertainty
In nested bullet hierarchies, critical qualifications get pushed to lower indent levels where decision-makers never reach them.
The pattern: Headlines state confident conclusions. Level-2 bullets provide supporting points. Level-3 and beyond contain the caveats, uncertainties, and contrary evidence. Readers scan headlines and top-level bullets, then move on. The information that would change the conclusion is technically present but functionally invisible.
The Columbia disaster slide: The headline claimed “conservatism” in the analysis. Four levels deep, a bullet noted that actual flight conditions were 640x outside the test database. The reassuring headline and the disqualifying data coexisted on the same slide without apparent contradiction, because the format separated them so thoroughly that integration was unlikely.
This isn’t unique to PowerPoint. The same pattern appears in:
- Executive summaries that omit methodology limitations
- Dashboard KPIs without confidence intervals
- AI-generated summaries that drop minority viewpoints
- Risk assessments where probability and consequence live in different sections
The deeper the bullet, the more important the information it contains: because that’s where presenters bury what doesn’t fit the narrative.
Related: 02-atom—format-shapes-cognition, 05-atom—uniform-confidence-problem, 04-atom—provenance-design