The Better Argument — A magazine to think about.

A magazine to think about.

Raw Material: The Gary Plan and the Engineering of the American Child

How does a building of fifty students in rural New Mexico differ from the colossi of 2,000 that inhabit every American suburb and city? This question is, I think, seldom asked — even though every American school used to look a lot closer to a New Mexican frontier building. Teachers were sourced locally and tended to be young unmarried women, the academic year spanned as few as twelve weeks, and schools integrated themselves into communities instead of retreating to become worlds unto themselves. Children read the Bible, Shakespeare, Greek and Latin, Roman histories, and foundational Anglo-American texts, participating in an older vision of education that sought to form the human person.

James Hartree21 min read

Teleoperation: A probable source of 21st century misery

I will present four case studies of teleoperation, and we will attempt to answer the question, will a persistent teleoperation labor market result in a new flavor of misery-creating dystopian labor, where workers exist as the sense organs for a machine-first superstructure?

Benjamin Scott10 min read

Human Exceptionalism

Humans have always occupied a strange space among the rest of the Earth’s beings, at least in thought. We have seen ourselves either as beings stretched across two distinct worlds (the physical world and a spiritual realm), or as occupying the chief position of this one world, rivaled in either case only by the gods in whose image we are created, or perhaps, who are created in ours, if we are rivaled at all.

Culture

Maybe I'll Read That: Flattery Falls Flat

Installment the fourth being a review of ‘Lingua Franca’ by Clancy Martin being itself a review of ‘The Frenchmen’ by Emily Eakin a history of French theory

Selective Reader4 min read

Technology

Intelligent Artifice

Are myths easy to understand? They can seem to be, since they give us images before they give us arguments. The ancient Greek myth of Talos, the bronze giant who guarded the Mediterranean island of Crete, is commonly understood to be about the first robot.

Daniel Rodriguez28 min read

Technology

Technological Metamorphosis

Botany is genetically one of the oldest natural investigations undertaken by humankind, for what could be more useful than being able to identify which plants are nice to eat, which are poisonous, and which can treat illnesses? It is useful not only to have this power of identification but also to be able to pass it on. Hence, traditions and folklore, and later, treatises and compendiums have passed down our classifications of plants to us from time immemorial.

Benjamin Scott18 min read

Technology

Artificial Everything

We are makers of things. We are all artists. The child who ties a kitchen towel around her neck to be a superhero is perhaps the purest artist of all. They create artificial worlds, words, and whimsy. The artificial can of course be beautiful, magical, imaginative, and even intensely helpful to mankind. We would not cut short a child’s play simply because they are not living in “reality.” Neither would we sneer at an artificial limb for not being “the real thing.” The artificial worlds of the artist inspire awe, introspection, and a sense of the transcendent.

Kollin Fields13 min read

Culture

You Can't Automate Eudaimonia

The question that I’d been hoping to examine through the use of both experience and philosophy was this: “Is there an ethical use for AI in writing?” As you’ll see, the question changed for me as I wrote.

Shannon Chamberlain20 min read

Politics

Popular Armageddon

With nearly a third of North American respondents expecting the world to “end” in some way during their lifetime, and with over half of young respondents internationally believing humanity is doomed, we must take apocalyptic nihilism seriously as a philosophical and sociopolitical force. The days of frothy-mouthed street preachers proclaiming “THE END IS NIGH” from crosswalk corners lay behind us. Even in the highest echelons of government, the specter of Armageddon justifies policy and animates ideology. How did we get here? What does it mean for our future that we cannot imagine it without death, destruction, and decay?

Maxwell Norman15 min read

Technology

Does AI Evolution Herald Human Devolution?

The machines we dreamed of always kept their distance. They hovered, they whirred, they did the dishes — but they stayed on the other side of the room, chrome and separate, things we could switch off and walk away from. The technology that actually arrived provides no such distance. It does not sit across from us; it watches us, learns us, and reaches steadily inward — first into how we behave, then into what we want, and at last toward the parts of us we cannot consciously control. The question is no longer what our machines will do for us. It is whether, by the end of it, any part of the self is left that they have not touched.

Kayla-Megan Burns and Tilda Nilsson13 min read

Technology

Artificial Intelligence has a Meeseeks Problem

Make no mistake, AI agents are the newest species on Earth, and we have attempted to replace millions of years of natural selection with a few months of internet-based human history training, and then unleashed them into the world. In a rush to be first, and in the spirit of competition, AI companies have inadvertently created the Meeseeks Problem, and it’s not a problem that’s going away any time soon, but unlike climate change, this is a problem that could end human civilization in less time than it takes to say, “Maybe we should pump the brakes on this AI thing.”

Roli Rivelino20 min read

Culture

Scroll: 11 Media Missives; Only Concept, No Meaning (No Social Media, Not Now, Not Ever)

The rising dissemination of literary-based and philosophic-based social media accounts present a uniquely problematic crossroads for members of the literary community. On one path we find eyeballs, potential: a path to exposure for non-readers, for blossoming writers and artists; for former readers to become reinvigorated. On the other path we find addiction, deferment: Look that quote up down the road, finish that essay down the road, bookmark that clip for later, read later, paint later. Right now I need to Scroll.

Rowan Foxley22 min read

Technology

Seeing through Memory: The Perceptual Grafting of New Technical Objects

When an individual begins grafting a new object into their experience, the first thing that happens is a recall. The individual, encountering something novel and unfamiliar, has no recourse other than to appeal to memory and to supplement the present perception with already experienced images of other objects and actions. We say here that the process of recall happens before the process of direct perception, counter to what most people would think.

Benjamin Scott15 min read

Culture

What the Romantics Can Still Teach Us About Attention

Digital environments alter those conditions. Platforms are structured around interruption, compression, and rapid shifts in focus. These habits train the mind to scan quickly and move between stimuli at speed. Romantic writing provides a language for this change because its poems and prose depend on accumulation, tonal shifts, and relations among parts. Reading Wordsworth or Keats requires the mind to remain with an experience long enough to perceive its internal shape. That practice develops attention as a condition of judgment.

Kevin Lopez Cruz4 min read

Technology

A Technological Environment

A social media platform might be more similar in kind, at least in analogy, to a theater. There is an audience (the “user”), a creator (writer, director, set designer, actors), and a platform (the stage, the theater). Without any of these components, the theater, or the social media platform, ceases to exist meaningfully.

James Hartree11 min read

Culture

Flowers Are Useless: In Praise of Inutility

Teaching English, like most vocations, comes with certain recurring challenges which define the job. In my line of work, convincing teenagers to read is perhaps the most fraught. Certain practices work to increase buy-in: dedicate time daily, in class, allow students to pick what they read, give a grade for reading if you are okay with making the entire exchange nakedly transactional.

Bill Shepherd14 min read

Culture

Maybe I'll Read That: I Get It, But I Can't Explain It

Installment the third being a review of … being itself a review of …

Selective Reader3 min read

Culture

Interpretants

In the week or two before the man killed himself, I’d started training my attention while running on biosemiosis, by which I mean — please bear with me — I’d been trying to open my attention up to the exchange of symbols and signs among the living organisms and systems surrounding me. One of the reasons I’d started doing this was that my mind kept returning to things that I didn’t want it to keep returning to.

Brian Leli15 min read

Culture

The Sober Bar That Won't Say Kratom

A Colorado kava chain markets itself as a healing space for people in recovery. Its menus never use the word "kratom." Its supply chain runs through a subsidiary with no public presence. The owner says that's all perfectly legal — and he may have a point. But a test may already have found kratom in his product, and he knows it.

James Hartree15 min read

Politics

Digital Artifacts and the Collapse of the Arendtian Public Realm

In an increasingly digitized society, digital artifacts are progressively replacing non-digital mediums across many aspects of man’s life. In a literal sense, digital artifacts are more permanent, everlasting, and durable than their non-digital counterparts.

Bryan Dawson12 min read

Culture

Am I a Sophist?

The teacher is an image of the whole of education, and in their presentation are communicated the aims and approaches of a life of learning. Standing before the classroom of students, the teacher has the option of showing themselves as a knower or a non-knower.

Aaron Shelsby7 min read

Culture

Annals of Obscenity: Art, The Person

In February 1921, John Quinn defended The Little Review in court against obscenity charges. As part of his defense, Quinn presented three experts in literature to explain the merits of Ulysses to the drowsy judges. But was it the compliment Philip Moeller of the Theatre Guild made it out to be when he, in his courtroom attestation to its merits, used Freud to explain Ulysses? Freud, after all, is useful notably for making sense of the incomprehensible ravings of madmen. And Moeller, like Freud, made himself sound like one, too, in the process of explaining; so much so that one of the white-haired judges requested that he “speak in a language that the court could understand.”

Jack Schaaf13 min read

Technology

The Privatization of the U.S. Government

The interface between citizen and government is changing. It is going high gloss, well engineered, aesthetic — the government is getting a private sector skin. TurboTax and MVD Express turn governmental functions into consumer experiences. It should be no surprise that using TurboTax is more efficient than filing a 1040 Tax Form with a black pen, and sending it off in a letter carried by a pigeon.

James Hartree8 min read

Technology

Technological Niche Construction

We must cobble together some sort of picture of what technology is and what it is doing, how it relates to us and us to it; and we all know by now that it will not slow down to help us out.

Benjamin Scott19 min read

Culture

Maybe I'll Read That: Book Passes ... Review Scores!

Installment the second being a review of Ian Buruma’s “Red Card” being itself a review of a book about soccer nationalism

Selective Reader2 min read

Culture

Maybe I’ll Read That: Art in the Time of Ignorance

Installment the first being a review of “Art in the Time of Fascism” by Alex Preston being itself a review of “Watching Over Her” by Jean Baptiste Andrea.

Selective Reader2 min read

Culture

A First-Century Slave Teaches Me How to Write

It took about 33 years for me to recover from my first professional success, and I owed it all to a first-century slave who never wrote down a single word in his life.

Shannon Chamberlain19 min read

Culture

Books Are Dead, And We Have Killed Them

AI summarization is something that the world of education, and particularly classical education, must reckon with if it is to show forth its value for young people growing up in the Intelligence Age. What is the value of the book if the ideas can be obtained separately from it? What is the value of the

Avery Lin8 min read

Technology

The Demigod Gap: Coexisting with Post-humans

“Esteemed guests, welcome! We will shortly begin our ascent. Please sit comfortably and enjoy this once-in-a-timeline opportunity to bear witness to Earth’s largest mountain. If perchance some mountain goats appear on our radar, we will call your attention to this exquisite, yet sadly dwindling breed. Monoculars are at the front. Enjoy the view!” Craig sat in the middle of the coach.

Elliot B Garamond8 min read

Technology

Who The Machine Says You Are

On how AI inherited rhetoric’s most dangerous art, and what it means for all of us. It would be convenient to treat all this as a matter of merely theoretical interest, a clever transposition of ancient categories onto modern technology, the sort of thing one publishes and then talks about at conferences.

Kem-Laurin Lubin13 min read

Technology

I Met A Genie

The genie was so very tempting. I was so fatigued by going through the motions of work. Especially writing- writing emails, connecting with people and understanding what they need, what they care about, and what moral boundaries they draw. Writing documents - figuring out what I want myself, how it breaks down into a set of steps, and then having to communicate it in a way that other people understand.

Elliot B Garamond11 min read

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The Better Argument is a community of thinkers committed to exploring the ideas that shape our world through rigorous dialogue, classical wisdom, and intellectual courage.

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The Better Argument — A magazine to think about.TheBetterArgument

Raw Material: The Gary Plan and the Engineering of the American Child

Teleoperation: A probable source of 21st century misery

Human Exceptionalism

More Articles

Maybe I'll Read That: Flattery Falls Flat

Intelligent Artifice

Technological Metamorphosis

Artificial Everything

You Can't Automate Eudaimonia

Popular Armageddon

Does AI Evolution Herald Human Devolution?

Artificial Intelligence has a Meeseeks Problem

Scroll: 11 Media Missives; Only Concept, No Meaning (No Social Media, Not Now, Not Ever)

Seeing through Memory: The Perceptual Grafting of New Technical Objects

What the Romantics Can Still Teach Us About Attention

A Technological Environment

Flowers Are Useless: In Praise of Inutility

Maybe I'll Read That: I Get It, But I Can't Explain It

Interpretants

The Sober Bar That Won't Say Kratom

Digital Artifacts and the Collapse of the Arendtian Public Realm

Am I a Sophist?

Annals of Obscenity: Art, The Person

The Privatization of the U.S. Government

Technological Niche Construction

Maybe I'll Read That: Book Passes ... Review Scores!

Maybe I’ll Read That: Art in the Time of Ignorance

A First-Century Slave Teaches Me How to Write

Books Are Dead, And We Have Killed Them

The Demigod Gap: Coexisting with Post-humans

Who The Machine Says You Are

I Met A Genie

The Better Argument — A magazine to think about.