thalidomide
Article
thalidomide is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 07, 2023 and December 01, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as “thalidomide for morning sickness - all of these were high-tech ideas that ended up going badly”; “far more people than thalidomide itself”. It most often appears alongside nuclear power, Aaronson, Abraham Davenport.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: March 07, 2023
- Last seen: December 01, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
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- nuclear power (2 shared issues)
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- Aaronson (1 shared issues)
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- Abraham Davenport (1 shared issues)
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- activists and intellectuals of the 70s and 80s (1 shared issues)
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- AI (1 shared issues)
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- AI Policy Institute (1 shared issues)
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- Arizona (1 shared issues)
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- Bertrand Russell (1 shared issues)
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- biomass burning aerosol (1 shared issues)
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- Bloomberg (1 shared issues)
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- Bodhisattva Vow (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.
But science and technology aren’t perfect bets. Gain-of-function research on coronaviruses was a big loss. Leaded gasoline, chlorofluorocarbon-based refrigerants, thalidomide for morning sickness - all of these were high-tech ideas that ended up going badly, not to mention all the individual planes that crashed or rockets that exploded.
27: Zan Tafakari has a roundup of responses to Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”; I think the thalidomide objections are bad (the backlash against thalidomide has harmed far more people than thalidomide itself, just like with nuclear power), but maybe there are some useful tidbits in there. Ezra Klein has a response of his own called The Chief Ideologist Of The Silicon Valley Elite Has Some Strange Ideas (I almost phrased that as “the chief ideologist of the Brooklyn elite has a response…”, but there’s no need to sink to their level).