I feel like examples would help here, if we can come up with some “safe” examples which are still valid.
One example which comes to mind for me is “Free will”. Supposed that such a thing didn’t exist and I had a proof, wouldn’t this be both useless and dangerous knowledge?
An example which may be more in line with what you have in mind is “A huge solar-flare is coming mid-2025”. Or perhaps “The recipe for (dangerous chemical)”? In any case, your argument seem to point to personally useful but collectively harmful information, such that people who hoard this information do so for their own advantage or because they don’t trust other people to know it.
I Googled the topic hoping to find examples of infohazards, but instead I found a EA megapost titled “We summarized the top info hazard articles”. You might already be familiar with them, but in case you’re not, they might have addressed your (and likely my) points already?
I think Free will is a great example. I think its existence is deeply questionable, in that it arguably does exist from a certain point of view (the intentional stance) and arguably not from other points of view (say, a purely physical point of view).
This knowledge seems both useless and dangerous, like you say. People can’t do much to change it, so it’s useless. People who know the infohazard can presumably use the lack of free will’s existence to compel certain behaviors.
Except that’s the world we already live in. Governments, authoritarian and otherwise, already compel people to do stuff all the time. Professional philosophers are quite clear with the public that free will is slippery and might well not exist. People generally go about their lives talking as if they have free will, but they certainly don’t consistently act like they have free will. It all adds up to normality, as Yudkowsky says.
So I would argue that the existence or lack thereof of free will is actually a strong, strong example in favor of the infopandora approach.
The “recipe for dangerous chemical” example also seems like it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Everyone knows what it means when your teenage son is taking hour long showers every chance he gets and his socks are super stiff whenever they get washed. Everyone also knows what it means when the local conspiracy nut starts purchasing large amounts of fuel oil and ammonium nitrate and trying to rent a van. Everyone knows what it means when your non-nuclear nation state starts trying to purchase the equipment to machine high-precision aluminum tubes to build centrifuges.
Rather than hoarding knowledge of how to (respectively) masturbate, pull an Oklahoma City, or launch a Manhattan Project, we trust responsible adults and responsible governments to know these things and to control them by controlling access to the rate-limiting step. If the US doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons (which seems like a no-brainer for American foreign policy), then it’s gonna be assassinating and coercing scientists and whatnot.
I feel like examples would help here, if we can come up with some “safe” examples which are still valid.
One example which comes to mind for me is “Free will”. Supposed that such a thing didn’t exist and I had a proof, wouldn’t this be both useless and dangerous knowledge?
An example which may be more in line with what you have in mind is “A huge solar-flare is coming mid-2025”. Or perhaps “The recipe for (dangerous chemical)”? In any case, your argument seem to point to personally useful but collectively harmful information, such that people who hoard this information do so for their own advantage or because they don’t trust other people to know it.
I Googled the topic hoping to find examples of infohazards, but instead I found a EA megapost titled “We summarized the top info hazard articles”. You might already be familiar with them, but in case you’re not, they might have addressed your (and likely my) points already?
I think Free will is a great example. I think its existence is deeply questionable, in that it arguably does exist from a certain point of view (the intentional stance) and arguably not from other points of view (say, a purely physical point of view).
This knowledge seems both useless and dangerous, like you say. People can’t do much to change it, so it’s useless. People who know the infohazard can presumably use the lack of free will’s existence to compel certain behaviors.
Except that’s the world we already live in. Governments, authoritarian and otherwise, already compel people to do stuff all the time. Professional philosophers are quite clear with the public that free will is slippery and might well not exist. People generally go about their lives talking as if they have free will, but they certainly don’t consistently act like they have free will. It all adds up to normality, as Yudkowsky says.
So I would argue that the existence or lack thereof of free will is actually a strong, strong example in favor of the infopandora approach.
The “recipe for dangerous chemical” example also seems like it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Everyone knows what it means when your teenage son is taking hour long showers every chance he gets and his socks are super stiff whenever they get washed. Everyone also knows what it means when the local conspiracy nut starts purchasing large amounts of fuel oil and ammonium nitrate and trying to rent a van. Everyone knows what it means when your non-nuclear nation state starts trying to purchase the equipment to machine high-precision aluminum tubes to build centrifuges.
Rather than hoarding knowledge of how to (respectively) masturbate, pull an Oklahoma City, or launch a Manhattan Project, we trust responsible adults and responsible governments to know these things and to control them by controlling access to the rate-limiting step. If the US doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons (which seems like a no-brainer for American foreign policy), then it’s gonna be assassinating and coercing scientists and whatnot.
Again, it all adds up to normality.