Think more carefully about arguments.
Briefings
Will generative AI eliminate creative jobs?
Audit found: All three treat market demand as exogenous — a fixed object the technology displaces, augments, or redistributes. None defends a demand-elasticity assumption, yet that parameter is doing the real work: high elasticity makes augmentation true, low elasticity makes displacement true. Argue the elasticity and you would actually be arguing the question.
Does raising the minimum wage cost jobs?
Audit found: Both sides, though, stand on the same floor. Each treats today's labour market as the fixed backdrop; neither asks what a market with sectoral bargaining — or a higher wage held for a decade — would do. That is the question that would actually settle it.
What "begging the question" actually means
Does individual climate action matter?
Audit found: All three positions treat aggregate emissions as the outcome variable that policy should optimise around. A genuinely structural critique of all three would note that emissions optimisation accepts the prior question — what economic model the emissions support — as already decided. Positions arguing for transformations of the underlying economic structure (degrowth, post-growth ecology, planetary-boundaries economics) face all three frames as variations on a shared optimisation problem they reject.
Should social media platforms be regulated like utilities?
Audit found: Both positions treat the question of regulation as primarily a constitutional rather than political-economic question. The constitutional frame assumes the relevant analysis is whether regulation is *permitted* — but the prior political-economic question of whether algorithmic curation systems should be permitted to exist in their current form, with their current incentive structures, is not on the table in either position. The disagreement is constrained to which constitutional outcome to accept rather than what political economy of digital communication a society should construct.
Should schools ban smartphones during the school day?
Audit found: All three positions treat the smartphone as the primary causal variable in student learning outcomes. Proponents of full bans, teacher discretion, and digital literacy education alike frame their arguments around device policy. None seriously examines whether the underlying pedagogical model — largely passive, lecture-centred instruction structured around extended periods of mandated attention — is what makes smartphone temptation acutely costly in the first place. A school organised around shorter attention cycles, active and project-based learning, and collaborative tasks would face a materially different smartphone problem. By debating device rules rather than instructional design, all three positions accept the existing pedagogical structure as a given and optimise around it — which may be the most consequential unstated assumption of all.
Should germline gene editing of human embryos be permitted?
Audit found: All three positions treat the question as primarily one of permissible clinical use, taking the development of the underlying capability as exogenous. The clinical-permission framing implicitly accepts that the basic science will continue to develop regardless of permission policies — and asks only how to use what becomes available. A position questioning whether the basic research itself should proceed at all is excluded from the debate as currently framed, even though it would be the operative position for those who reach "no — it crosses a line" on principled grounds.
Is effective altruism a coherent ethical framework?
Audit found: Both positions assume the question is about EA-as-currently-practised rather than EA-as-philosophical-framework. A more interesting question both sides avoid is whether the analytical rigour EA brings to charitable evaluation — which has clear value — can be separated from the longtermist priorities and concentrated philanthropic power that the critics object to. Both positions treat EA as a package deal; neither asks whether the package can be unbundled.
Placeholder briefing — replace with a real contested question
Audit found: Placeholder shared assumption — the premise both sides quietly take for granted. Replace when the real briefing is written.
Chrome Extension
Audit any argument while you read - runs in the side panel against the page in view.
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