I’ve had a look through Diana’s #trilema log summaries, to compare and contrast with my own. They’re markedly different; I’m surprised at the extent of pruning: many interesting topics aren’t covered at all, and I can’t spot a consistent rule for which subjects get excluded. Republican work, on the other hand, gets consistently included – including blog posts (the latter usually in some detail). The extent of coverage scales with the depth/complexity of the subject – ranging from single sentences to lengthy paragraphs.
I’ve somehow managed to get this backward: giving too few words to complex subjects, and too many to trivial ones. To be fair, the Signal:Noise in #t is markedly different from the #o dialogues I’ve summarised between Diana and the somewhat manic Shrysr (all the more need for pruning; not getting lost in the weeds).
Diana also editorialises (including irony/humour), which makes her summaries a pleasure to read. I’d assumed summaries ought to be a kind of sterile, matter-of-fact court record type of thing: X happened, and it means Y – Next Topic. No wonder my summaries come across so dry/joyless/droning.
Oh, and I added a million things to my reading list.
3rd December
No mention of vaccination discussion; lobbes’ technical strace issue; Eliza/fetlife users failing Turing test
Esthlos’ absence is editorialised
Highly technical part (Spyked’s V-regrinds) gets a lengthier treatment
Diana gives a broad overview of the general ideas, rather than trying to summarise each line/subthought individually [as I’ve been trying – and often getting lost in the weeds while doing so]
4th December
No mention of Royal Society scans, fetus papyraceus; how MP met chet and hanbot; alf’s attempt to decruft chromebook; vtrons; alf’s proposed vintage iron tinkering, textile trials anecdote [perhaps Diana is only summarising topics strictly concerned with TMSR’s workings, rather than general discussion?]
Lengthy treatment of technical matter (postgres vs mysql; chaotic forking of V-trees) [I’ve been over-simplifying/shortening summaries of complex/technical matters – “lowering the word count is the most important thing!”]
5th December
No mention of symbolics, MacIvory; mysql, postgres; mechanical vs software; Romanians’ reality-follows-head mental model discussions
6th December
Single-sentence treatment of simple topics
Humour included in mats narrative [summaries don’t have to be dry/clinical]
No mention of bail bondsmen; domestic livestock discussions
7th December
No mention of killing-LARPing-cops-until-they-LARP-no-more as only means of achieving revolution discussion
Contents of Qntra articles are not summarised
8th December
No mention of boi vs girl idiocy discussion
Thorough summary of MP’s article [I’ve been giving only a terse overview of articles]
9th December
Slavery discussion summarised [Why? Doesn’t seem to be directly related to Republican workings, like many topics excluded above. Maybe it’s just a case of “These are the things I think worth summarising”?]
The focus is on what is important (and therefore the reader should *get interested in* and *benefits from reading*), not what a random reader “finds interesting”. At most you can say indeed that “there is no rule” in that value itself is subjective, of course, but what that means is simply the fact that indeed, a *useful* summary is not and cannot be the result of blindly/mechanically applying a set of rules. For this same reason and as an example, even an important topic gets a place in the summary only to the extent that there is something going on with/about/related to it, not just because “oh, that word was mentioned”.
Extracting, filtering and ordering accurately and by degrees what *matters* (hence: what is important) may not be an easy task and not even a very well defined one (in the mechanical, rule-based sense) but it still is, itself, the most important thing in the world, not even just for summaries at that. Another way to look at this would be I suppose in political terms: are you writing a socialist summary (every utterance matters the same!) or an elitist summary (some matter more, some less and some not at all even!) ?
While you might have perhaps relatively little experience with full-blown socialist prose, I can tell you from experience that it’s utterly and mind-numbingly boring (moreover: humour is quite a big no-no, indeed and for very good reason as it can easily break various precarious pretenses).
Part of the reason for this is what I said above and part of the reason is otherwise plainly stated in the comments. Note also that ~most of the topics you mention as “not mentioned” actually get mentioned – in other summaries, namely at the point where they are basically acted upon. This being said, there are some that I skipped precisely because they are either trite or mere detours (the “ivory” wild goose chase is a good example in this sense and if you were to follow this further as it evolved in time you’ll see plenty of confirmation for this evaluation of mine at the time of this summary).
Eh, “somehow”, shall I tell you exactly and precisely “how” or do you figure it out by yourself?
That’s why the #o summaries are *easier* to write than #t summaries (or so I’d have thought until I saw various botched attempts with #o so that I *really* don’t want to see just what they end up making of #t).
Well, it’s your summary so you get to decide just what it is going to be exactly – the whole point is to do it *well*, not to do it “so that it conforms to the book-of-rules”. For that matter, nobody has (or can ever have) a monopoly on defining now what things “should be” – do it so that it’s *most useful*, that’s the whole requirement. Whether that means it includes irony or bullet lists or innuendos or whatever else is entirely up to each author (and yes, personal style will anyway colour that, at least to the extent that one is enough of a writer to have developed such a thing as personal style).
Comment by Diana Coman — October 16, 2020 @ 10:27 am
Thank you for the incredibly thorough (and useful!) feedback! Who’d’ve thought a style review would lead to discussions on value subjectivity and the-most-important-thing-in-the-world (I’m growing fonder of the German-style noun-agglutination)! With regard to getting interested in important things, I recall you suggesting I take a look at Eulora – I wasn’t interested at the time, but that might be an issue with me; perhaps it’d be useful and of benefit.
I knew as soon as I read your comment: complex topics are hard; trivial ones are easy, and I’m lazy/go for whatever’s easiest (now to switch to doing things well (ie. so they’re most useful); not easiest/quickest/”should-be”/the Procrustean book-of-rules-says…)
Comment by Daniel Godwin — October 18, 2020 @ 4:47 pm
How’s it going?
Comment by Diana Coman — October 24, 2020 @ 8:38 am
Thanks for asking! I’ve got a bunch of stuff on the go – JWRD, moving to Spain and more log summaries; I’ve been hesitant to upload works in progress on account of the agendas-or-equivalent thing:
Though, I suppose this is more about pretending to work than showing work-so-far. I’ll get some stuff finished and published this weekend, at any rate.
PS. How’re you? :)
Comment by Daniel Godwin — October 24, 2020 @ 6:47 pm
It is indeed. Work in progress is fine – as long as it *is* work and there is even …progress! (It’s really the pretense that is the problem, anywhere and at any time it might happen, nothing else.)
I’m alright, thanks.
Comment by Diana Coman — October 24, 2020 @ 7:07 pm