News
AI's biggest critic has lost the plot
6+ hour, 39+ min ago (1899+ words) We're taking The Argument to San Francisco! On May 13, Kelsey Piper and I are debating a question that feels unavoidable right now: Is AI actually changing how science gets done, or are we in the middle of a very expensive…...
Destroy the internet to save it?
1+ week, 5+ day ago (83+ words) Editor-in-Chief of The Argument | jerusalem@theargumentmag. com Destroy the internet to save it? People tend to defend online anonymity by pointing to the long tradition of anonymous speech in American democracy. But modern anonymity is an entirely new beast. When…...
A generation of cheaters
3+ week, 6+ hour ago (383+ words) Cheating isn't new. Every generation has found its tools: crib sheets, scribbled TI-84 programs, early-2000s essay mills, a friend who took the class last semester. Of course, the extent to which students cheat depends in part on the available tools....
Against the Smartphone Theory of Everything
1+ mon, 2+ day ago (1599+ words) In 2018, Stanford economist Matthew Gentzkow and his colleagues paid about 1, 700 Americans to deactivate Facebook for four weeks before the midterm elections. Those who logged off were happier, less anxious, and less politically polarized. Findings like these have trickled through academia…...
AI can do work. Can it do a job?
1+ mon, 2+ week ago (1812+ words) We're hiring a Senior Editor to join our team. Are you a liberal? Do you love to argue? Do you read social science research for fun? Apply! To explain her pivot into the beverage industry, journalist Arielle Pardes recently told…...
The Tinder-ization of the job market
1+ mon, 3+ week ago (301+ words) Is AI going to take everyone's jobs? A recent report went viral after claiming there were 55, 000 AI-related layoffs in 2025. On the one hand, this is fairly silly. Fifty-five thousand layoffs is a very small number in a country with a…...
Anthropic is somehow both too dangerous to allow and essential to national security
2+ mon, 2+ day ago (1544+ words) Anthropic was already retraining Claude Gov to agree to tasks that it usually refuses to do, like handle classified information, but killer autonomous robots and mass domestic surveillance were lines in the sand. "Anthropic is committed to using frontier AI…...
Why schools keep losing the technology bet
2+ mon, 4+ day ago (364+ words) The Argument | Jerusalem Demsas Why schools keep losing the technology bet A computer in every classroom was supposed to revolutionize education. Now AI is making the same promise. It's hard to remember, in our age of despair, cynicism, and parents…...
Twitter is not real life
2+ mon, 3+ week ago (809+ words) Whether you're getting your information from Tik Tok, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, cable news, or elsewhere, platforms are shaping your information diet in ways you may not even notice. Content is inseparable from the vehicle within which it arrives. A large…...
Anthropic probably shouldn't be doing this, but they're doing it well
3+ mon, 1+ day ago (276+ words) We " by which I mean society as a whole, but also the teams at AI companies trying to design the AIs " want a bunch of impossible, contradictory things from their AIs. Companies don't want their agents to be humorless scolds…...