On review, there was already a summary at the beginning of the Authoritarian Empiricism post
I didn’t recognize this as a summary because it seemed to be talking about a specific “pseudo-community” and I didn’t interpret it as making a general point. Even reading it now, knowing that it’s a summary, I still can’t tell what the main point of the article might be. The beginning of Totalitarian ethical systems seems clearer as summary now that you’ve described it as such, but before that I didn’t know if it was presenting the main point or just an example of a more general point or something tangential, etc., since I didn’t understand all of the rest of the post so I couldn’t be sure the main point of the post wasn’t something different.
Also it seems like the point of a summary is to clearly communicate what the main points of the post are so the reader has some reference to know whether they should read the rest of it and also to help understand the rest of the post (since they can interpret it in relation to the main points) and having an unlabeled summary seems to defeat these purposes as the reader can’t even recognize the summary as a summary before they’ve read and understood the rest of the post.
Thanks for the additional detail. In general I consider a post of that length that has a “main point” to be too long. I’m writing something more like essays than like treatises, while it seems to me that your reading style is optimized for treatises. When I’m writing something more like a treatise, I do find it intuitive to have summaries of main points, clear section headings, etc. But the essay form tends to explore the connections between a set of ideas rather than work out a detailed argument for one.
I’m open to arguments that I should be investing more in treatises, but right now I don’t really see the extra work per idea as paying off in a greater number of readers understanding the ideas and taking initiative to extend them, apply them, or explain them to others in other contexts.
I didn’t recognize this as a summary because it seemed to be talking about a specific “pseudo-community” and I didn’t interpret it as making a general point. Even reading it now, knowing that it’s a summary, I still can’t tell what the main point of the article might be. The beginning of Totalitarian ethical systems seems clearer as summary now that you’ve described it as such, but before that I didn’t know if it was presenting the main point or just an example of a more general point or something tangential, etc., since I didn’t understand all of the rest of the post so I couldn’t be sure the main point of the post wasn’t something different.
Also it seems like the point of a summary is to clearly communicate what the main points of the post are so the reader has some reference to know whether they should read the rest of it and also to help understand the rest of the post (since they can interpret it in relation to the main points) and having an unlabeled summary seems to defeat these purposes as the reader can’t even recognize the summary as a summary before they’ve read and understood the rest of the post.
Thanks for the additional detail. In general I consider a post of that length that has a “main point” to be too long. I’m writing something more like essays than like treatises, while it seems to me that your reading style is optimized for treatises. When I’m writing something more like a treatise, I do find it intuitive to have summaries of main points, clear section headings, etc. But the essay form tends to explore the connections between a set of ideas rather than work out a detailed argument for one.
I’m open to arguments that I should be investing more in treatises, but right now I don’t really see the extra work per idea as paying off in a greater number of readers understanding the ideas and taking initiative to extend them, apply them, or explain them to others in other contexts.