OxyContin
Article
OxyContin is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 21, 2023 and April 25, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Arguing about gender is like taking OxyContin”; “People didn’t worry enough about … OxyContin”. It most often appears alongside Aella, San Francisco, 1990s.
Metadata
- Category: Brands
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: August 21, 2023
- Last seen: April 25, 2024
Appears In
- What Can Fetish Research Tell Us About AI?
- Highlights From The Comments On Fetishes
- Desperately Trying To Fathom The Coffeepocalypse Argument
Related Pages
-
- Aella (2 shared issues)
-
- San Francisco (2 shared issues)
-
- 1990s (1 shared issues)
-
- 2020 election (1 shared issues)
-
- ACX (1 shared issues)
-
- AI Alignment (1 shared issues)
-
- al-Qaeda (1 shared issues)
-
- Alexander (1 shared issues)
-
- alignmentforum.org (1 shared issues)
-
- AMA (1 shared issues)
-
- Anand (1 shared issues)
-
- antipsychotics (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Arguing about gender is like taking OxyContin. There can be good reasons to do it. But most people don’t do it for the good reasons. And even if you start doing it for good reasons, you might get addicted and ruin your life. Walk through San Francisco if you want to see people who ruined their lives with opioids; browse Substack to get a visceral appreciation of the dangers of arguing about gender.
Arguing about gender is like taking OxyContin. There can be good reasons to do it. But most people don’t do it for the good reasons. And even if you start doing it for good reasons, you might get addicted and ruin your life. Walk through San Francisco if you want to see people who ruined their lives with opioids; browse Substack to get a visceral appreciation of the dangers of arguing about gender.
But - even granting that there are many cases of both - are these useful? There are many cases of moral panics turning out to be nothing. But there are many other cases of moral panics proving true, or of people not worrying about things they should worry about. People didn’t worry enough about tobacco, and then it killed lots of people. People didn’t worry enough about lead in gasoline, and then it poisoned lots of children. People didn’t worry enough about global warming, OxyContin, al-Qaeda, growing international tension in the pre-WWI European system, etc, until after those things had already gotten out of control and hurt lots of people. We even have words and idioms for this kind of failure to listen to warnings - like the ostrich burying its head in the sand.