Fuzzy Little Things I Find Interesting

Claude Summarizes Project 2025

Over the next few days my plan is to make a series of blog posts using Claude.AI to summarize the contents of the Project 2025 agenda.

I’m doing this for a few reasons.

First, a lot of the summarizes I’ve seen for Project 2025 are clearly biased and often misleading or factually flat out wrong. And second, I’m interested to see how Claude AI handles summarizing documents of this nature.

I personally don’t have a dog in this fight, outside of wanting a relatively unbiased understanding of what is actually going on. Further, I’m fascinated by this nearly 900 page document, in that it seems to cover nearly every aspect of the Federal Government. And as such, it represents a fantastic insight into our government–albeit from a conservative slant.

Note: I do want to note an interesting thing about Claude. When I do each summary I upload the chapter alongside the introduction and preface of the document into a single project, then ask about the document I just uploaded. My thinking is that the preface offers ‘context’ to Claude about how to interpret the chapter.

Now what I’ve discovered is that if you upload more than a single chapter at a time, Claude will “hallucinate”: that is, it will get confused as to which recommendations were made in which chapter. So, for example, today I uploaded chapters 10 through 12, then asked Claude about the Department of Agriculture recommendations. And it ‘hallucinated’ about moving the ARPA-E program out from under the Department of Agriculture–forgetting that it’s mentioned in the chapter on the Department of Energy.

Which means I had to go back and remove the other two chapters–to help prevent Claude from hallucinating.

I do think it’s a fascinating limitation on Claude, but which totally makes sense. It’s like I’m asking someone to read a three-chapter book, then entirely from memory summarize the first chapter. Of course they may get confused about what took place in which chapter, especially if the chapters don’t describe an event in chronological order.

And finally, I feed all 30 blog posts back into Claude, and had a conversation about the results:

And of course I’d be remiss not to quote the last question and answer I asked of Claude:

Q: In other words, aside from the level of detail offered by Project 2025, is it fair to say that most of this essentially expands on previously made conservative proposals?

Yes, that's a fair assessment. Based on the analysis, it's accurate to say that Project 2025 largely expands on and provides more detailed implementation plans for previously made conservative proposals. The document takes many longstanding Republican and conservative policy positions and develops them into more comprehensive and specific plans for government-wide implementation.

Key points supporting this conclusion:

  1. Most core ideas align with traditional conservative principles (e.g., smaller government, deregulation, free-market approaches).

  2. Many specific policy recommendations have been part of Republican platforms or conservative think tank proposals for years.

  3. The document often takes familiar conservative ideas and extends them further or applies them more broadly across government agencies.

  4. While there are some newer or more radical proposals, these generally represent a minority of the overall content.

  5. The main innovation of Project 2025 appears to be its comprehensive nature and the level of detail it provides for implementing conservative ideas across the entire federal government.

So, while Project 2025 does introduce some new elements and more aggressive versions of certain policies, it's primarily an expansion and detailed elaboration of existing conservative policy proposals. The document's significance lies more in its comprehensive scope and implementation details rather than in introducing fundamentally new conservative policy ideas.