I don’t think I’d go as far as deliberately risking my sanity (such as it is).
On the other hand, I do think there’s room for a more general theory of harmful knowledge. While some of the groundwork has been laid, and we have a few ad-hoc guidelines in place, we don’t yet have a good consensus on epistemic safety, …
So has knowledge that is harmful in more than specific situations been demonstrated to exist, or are you referring to theorising?
Depends what bounds you want to put on it. Basilisk-like knowledge (what the Bostrom paper calls a neuropsychological hazard) affecting the human cognitive architecture has not as far as I know been demonstrated to exist. Several other context-dependent but still fairly general informational hazards (ideological, for example) do clearly exist, though, and many of them seem poorly understood.
The forbidden topic in particular seems to belong to an interesting family of reflective hazards that hasn’t gotten much attention at all, although for the sake of local norms I’d rather not devote too much attention to it here.
Doh. Maybe I’m too tired so my brain is working less well than I’d hope, but I hadn’t noticed the link to the Bostrom paper there. I need to try to more carefully read through the stuff people say to me.
I’ll give the paper a read-through tomorrow.
[edit] I scanned the paper, but the tiny section on neuropsychological hazard seemed to tend toward the low-level (photosensitive epilepsy as one example), rather than the Lovecraftian (as I might have expected it to, if I had thought carefully about it, since I don’t place much credence in high-level ideas that could blow your mind that way)
I don’t think I’d go as far as deliberately risking my sanity (such as it is).
So has knowledge that is harmful in more than specific situations been demonstrated to exist, or are you referring to theorising?
Depends what bounds you want to put on it. Basilisk-like knowledge (what the Bostrom paper calls a neuropsychological hazard) affecting the human cognitive architecture has not as far as I know been demonstrated to exist. Several other context-dependent but still fairly general informational hazards (ideological, for example) do clearly exist, though, and many of them seem poorly understood.
The forbidden topic in particular seems to belong to an interesting family of reflective hazards that hasn’t gotten much attention at all, although for the sake of local norms I’d rather not devote too much attention to it here.
Doh. Maybe I’m too tired so my brain is working less well than I’d hope, but I hadn’t noticed the link to the Bostrom paper there. I need to try to more carefully read through the stuff people say to me.
I’ll give the paper a read-through tomorrow.
[edit] I scanned the paper, but the tiny section on neuropsychological hazard seemed to tend toward the low-level (photosensitive epilepsy as one example), rather than the Lovecraftian (as I might have expected it to, if I had thought carefully about it, since I don’t place much credence in high-level ideas that could blow your mind that way)