I don’t think you missed a whole lot. The examples linked are interesting, but the argument is just an attempt to classify arguments about phenomena/abstractions. The classification doesn’t really shed much insight on how those phenomena or abstractions work, or explain where “less-insightful” essays/articles go wrong.
Basically it comes down to: “If you wrote something interesting its primary argument might have been of this form, or this form, or this form. End.”
From the “conclusion”:
> Once you understand the formula above, it should become trivially easy to create an indefinite number of insights.
Sorry, but there’s no shortcut for generating insight. It requires deeply understanding something and then clearly explaining it, both of which are hard work.
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Just so this comment isn’t a waste, here’s a link to a Hofstadter essay about how (he claims) cognition works, which should shed some insight into how arguments in general are structured:
"The classification doesn’t really shed much insight on how those phenomena or abstractions work, or explain where 'less-insightful' essays/articles go wrong."
So in part two I explain the difference between insightful/informative/interesting/funny, and argue for a different evolutionary role for each. I think once you get the whole theory it will be more clear how this becomes actionable.
I started writing some point-by-point comments about your essay, but that ended up long enough to just make me seem like a jerk.
Anyway, I have issues with everything from your premise (“generating insight is trivial”), through your specific structure (how you classify these argument styles), and the examples you use to back them up (several of which I think are either trivial or wrong), to the language at the word level (words like “actionable” are just MBA technobabble).
My suggestion would be to read a couple books on rhetoric, or maybe on construction of philosophical arguments. These topics have been studied intensively (insightfully!) since at least the Greeks.
Basically it comes down to: “If you wrote something interesting its primary argument might have been of this form, or this form, or this form. End.”
From the “conclusion”:
> Once you understand the formula above, it should become trivially easy to create an indefinite number of insights.
Sorry, but there’s no shortcut for generating insight. It requires deeply understanding something and then clearly explaining it, both of which are hard work.
-------
Just so this comment isn’t a waste, here’s a link to a Hofstadter essay about how (he claims) cognition works, which should shed some insight into how arguments in general are structured:
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.h...