Allow me to revise your rewrite. “Ceteris paribus, receiving information cannot hurt you. In some non-ceteris-paribus circumstances, receiving information might hurt you.”
Unfortunately, this is exactly what I am objecting to. I agree it is a good heuristic to receive information. This is not what the post is about; it is not about ceteris paribus. Emphasis added:
More information is never a bad thing.
…The second of these is always at least as large as the first.
In a post claiming to offer proofs, I take these universal qualifiers at face value. They may be true in the simplified model. They are not true in many other models, one of which I have linked.
Allow me to revise your rewrite. “Ceteris paribus, receiving information cannot hurt you. In some non-ceteris-paribus circumstances, receiving information might hurt you.”
Unfortunately, this is exactly what I am objecting to. I agree it is a good heuristic to receive information. This is not what the post is about; it is not about ceteris paribus. Emphasis added:
In a post claiming to offer proofs, I take these universal qualifiers at face value. They may be true in the simplified model. They are not true in many other models, one of which I have linked.
Since I was downvoted so very severely, I’ll add another link, an entire paper by Nick Bostrom on all the kinds of information which receiving can hurt you: http://www.nickbostrom.com/information-hazards.pdf
In which case, you might as well include the costs for actually figuring it out.