Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Problem of Repetition
Bloom’s taxonomy as a lens on online discourse, repetition, and why depth struggles to surface in algorithm-driven spaces.
I watched a video recently about Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy of thinking (the video is embedded at the bottom of this post), and I thought the framework was useful enough to share. Not as the educational model it was originally intended for, but to use it as a way to look at how people actually think and communicate nowadays, especially online.
Bloom’s taxonomy lays out a hierarchy of cognition, from basic remembering up to analysis, evaluation, and creation. What’s interesting is not the pyramid itself, but how much public discourse seems to stall at the very bottom of it. Once you start paying attention to this, a lot of conversation begins to sound like repetition rather than thought.
You see it everywhere. On LinkedIn. Here, on Substack. On basically all “social” platforms in general. People restating the same ideas, the same phrases, the same conclusions. Perhaps slightly reworded, sometimes even a straight up copy. It often looks like engagement filled with likes (comments are much more rare...), but structurally it’s mostly just remembering. Information moving around without being transformed by the people or things touching it.
The problem isn’t that people are unintelligent—or rather that they do not have the potential to climb the ranking. It’s that the systems we use rewards repetition far more than it rewards analysis. Likes, reach, and visibility tend to follow familiarity in a comfortable ways, not depth that generates friction. Saying what’s already recognisable travels faster than breaking something apart and reassembling it. There is a striking resembles to how the universe transcends it’s own equilibrium.
Moving beyond remembering is much harder than it looks. Analysis takes time, context, and friction. It usually doesn’t land cleanly in short formats and it doesn’t always invite common agreement. So a lot of conversations simply stop before they even reach there, not because they are at a dead end, but rather because there’s no incentive to push further. This starts to sound a awful lot like “ghosting”.
What’s strange is that once you do start thinking beyond that level, sharing becomes more difficult instead of easier. You realise that what you’re saying isn’t particularly unique in content, only in how it’s connected, structured, or contextualised. Systems built around speed, reaction, and scale naturally amplify the lowest levels of cognition. With noise requiring little to no energy to produce, it circulates easily. While, just like with electrical systems, a structured or intentional signal requires a lot more energy to maintain.
Perhaps, in context of Substack, this newsletter, and everything else, technology should function as secondary rather than primary. Not as the place where thinking happens, but as a place where things get shared after they’ve been formed elsewhere. Local, physical, bounded contexts seem better suited for actual thought. Online spaces are better at redistribution than generation. I think that a lot of us are forgetting this.
Anyway, I’m sharing the video below simply because Bloom’s taxonomy is a surprisingly fitting lens for noticing all of this. Let me know what you think about this, I’m curious whether the pattern feels familiar to you.
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We won’t dissect this article directly, but the themes overlap. If this piece resonated, this session will take it deeper. Tickets are available at TheNexusFormula.com
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