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Every book and every long article should start with a bullet point preface of significant conclusions and noteworthy evidence / argumentation that led to the conclusions. That way we can quickly parse whether it is worth it to invest our time on it (or whether: we have gone through the information before; there is nothing noteworthy to glean from it). Even scientific articles should do this immediately on the first page, not just somewhere in their discussion / conclusion.
Scientific papers already do this; the abstract is almost always first and it does exactly what you want.
Yes, some ideas do need to be slow-rolled (or the audience has to be primed), but that’s also so exceptional a case that it might as well not exist and even that doesn’t need to blow the twist if you do it correctly.
Most scientific and academic papers I read don’t do this though. The abstract only says their conclusion for a few criteria, sometimes only in general terms. The discussion or results section you’ll often find more complete conclusions and a lot of sentences that contain words like “surprisingly”, “unexpectedly”, “interestingly”, “one noteworthy finding”. That’s a lot of information that should be front and center rather than buried in the discussion section.
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