Methodology

This site is a Knowledge Base containing a chapter-by-chapter Summary of the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, better known as: **Project 2025.**

What does it mean to summarize?

Definition: A summary is a condensed version of a larger text or presentation that highlights its main points, usually to convey the essential information quickly and efficiently. It distills the most important ideas, events, or arguments without going into detail, allowing the reader or listener to grasp the core essence of the original material without needing to engage with it fully. Summaries are useful for quickly understanding the gist of documents, books, articles, meetings, or multimedia content.

An important caveat you need to understand about a document summary is that by definition, not every detail is retained. What exactly is included and/or excluded in the summary is a series of choices by the summarizer – that’s ChatGPT-4o !

For this website we have removed as much political bias from this process as we can. We have attempted to be as fair and non-partisan as possible. We have done this by automating as much of the summarizing process as possible.

Summary Generation

Let me review the methodology that was used to generate the Project 2025 Chapter Summaries:

  1. The original Project 2025 text was used “In-Full”. There have been NO word additions or subtractions from the original text. (Note: Ch26a had to be split into two runs because of the chapter length and the use of large data charts.)
  2. Chapter Titles Were Modified as follows:

a) Original Chapter Titles were written in “ALL CAPS” upper-case only. I changed the Titles to be “Proper Case” using a more common Upper-Case (first letter) and Lower-Case (remaining letters) for each word.

b) For each chapter I added the phrase “(Summary – pg.xx)” to the end of each Chapter Title before submitting to ChatGPT, The actual PDF page number would be manually copied into the “xx” placeholder. These steps were used to append the word “Summary” and the original chapter’s PDF page number to the ChatGPT output. The PDF page number was then used to created a hyper-link pointing back to the Project 2025 document and open the original PDF at the page location of the original Chapter starting point.

  1. All Chapter Summarizes were generated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o model (note: the paid subscription version was used).
  2. An initial series of Summarizing Experiments we conducted to settle on a ChatGPT prompt that produced generic “neutral” summaries (see prompt below). Note: I was the sole arbiter on determining the non-biased output of these tests, so if there is any bias it is a) unintentional and b) solely my fault.

Analysis Generation

All Chapter Analysis was performed by ChatGPT-4o using the same original text that was enter as input for the chapter summarization. In fact the chapter text was only enter once, so all text parameters were identical for the summary generation and the analysis generation.

Here is the command that was used to ask ChatGPT to perform an analysis: (note: see line “4.” below in the “ChatGPT Prompt for generating all Summaries & Analysis”)

  1. Provide a bullet list Analysis of the chapter describing possible ramifications if the ideas of the chapter were implemented by the U.S Government.

ChatGPT Prompt used for generating all Summaries & Analysis

The following is the ChatGPT Prompt template that I used to summarize each Project 2025 chapter:

ChatGPT Prompt ver.2024-08-11g:

xxxxxxxxxxx Copy Prompt Template Starting on Next Line xxxxxxxxxxx

Please help me write a summary blog post for the chapter below which begins with: “Start Chapter TEXT:”, and ends at: ”Stop Chapter TEXT”.

The summary blog post should include all the important points discussed in the original chapter text.

Please include the following subsections:

  1. The Chapter Title followed immediately by the text “(Summary – pg.#PDFpg#)” where “#PDFpg#” is the original text’s numeric page number.
  2. The name of the Author, formatted as: “Author:” then the name of the author. ****.
  3. A bullet list Summary of the all the ideas presented in the original chapter text. Please include everything important in the original text.
  4. Provide a bullet list Analysis of the chapter describing possible ramifications if the ideas of the chapter were implemented by the U.S Government.
  5. Next, suggest 5 short descriptive Tags, each tag listed as a bullet list with one tag per line, so that the list can be appended to the post.
  6. Lastly add the following text: “Read the original chapter text here: https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf#page=#PDFpg# “ , but substitute the actual numeric value (represent here by “#PDFpg#”) located at the end of the top Chapter Title “(Summary – pg.##)” clause for the text “#PDFpg#” in the line above.
  7. Please include this prompt version line at the end of the summary you create:
  8. “This summary created using ChatGPT Prompt ver: 2024-08-11g“

“Start Chapter TEXT:”

Place Chapter Text Here

“Stop Chapter TEXT”.

Prompt Execution Instructions:

To Execute this Summarizing/Analyzing Procedure, the original Project Chapter Text would be copied into the Prompt script at the location marked: “Place Chapter Text Here”, then the entire Prompt script, starting with “Please help…” down to and including the ending clause ““Stop Chapter TEXT”.” would be copied and then pasted into ChatGPT’s prompt input field. Note: you can use any plain text editor to perform the copy/paste operations (e.g.: MS-Word, Notion, Notepad+, etc.; your choice).

Press “Enter” key to start ChatGPT and wait for the summary/analysis to be generated; usually about 2-5 seconds depending on the Chapter Text length.

-end of procedure-

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