I agree that it’s inconvenient that these two concepts are often both referred to with the same word. My opinion is that we should settle on using “infohazard” to refer to the thing you’re proposing calling “sociohazard”, because it’s a more important concept that comes up more often, and you should make up a new word for “knowledge that is personally damaging”. I suggest “cognitohazard”.
I think you’ll have an easier time disambiguating this way than disambiguating in the way you proposed, among other reasons because you’re more influential among the people who primarily think of “cognitohazard” when they hear “infohazard”.
My personal exposure to the term “infohazard” comes primarily from fiction where it referred to knowledge that harms the knower. (To give an example I recently encountered: Worth the Candle.)
My model predicts that getting scholars to collectively switch terminology is hard, but still easier than getting fiction authors to collectively switch terminology. I don’t think there’s any action that could plausibly be taken by the LessWrong community that would break the associations that “infohazard” currently has in fiction.
Even if you could magically get all the authors to switch to “cognitohazard”, I don’t think that would help very much, because “infohazard” is similar enough that someone who isn’t previously aware of a formal distinction between them is likely to map them onto the same mental bucket.
If I had godlike powers to dictate what terms people use, I wouldn’t use any term containing the word “hazard” to refer to information that is harmless to you but that someone else doesn’t want you to know. This flies in the face of my intuitive sense of how the term “hazard” is commonly used. That’s, like...imagine if some plutocrats were trying to keep most people poor so that they could control them better, and they started referring to money as “finance-hazard” or something; this term would strike me as being obviously an attempt at manipulation. If the person calling something a “hazard” does not themselves want to be protected from it, then I call BS.
One way to change it might be to convince the writers/editors of the SCP Foundation wiki to clarify definitions in their fiction—that seems to be the source of most modern uses of the term, though it’s likely already too late for that.
To me “cognitohazard” seems like a good term for basilisks and their less exotic brethren—things that can somehow mess up your thinking when you hear them—but not for things more like spoilers. I’m not sure “infohazard” is great for that either but it seems less weird to me. (I don’t think I would ever refer to a spoiler as either an “infohazard” or a “cognitohazard”.)
Separately: Perhaps “infohazard” is, at present, unfixably ambiguous and we should use (say) “cognitohazard” for things that are individually harmful and “sociohazard” for things that are collectively harmful, and “infohazard” not at all.
I find the distinction (even within the personal level) interesting.
“Cognitohazard” to me sounds “this will mess up your thinking”.
But quite often, the hazard is that it will mess up your emotional state, and I’d want a different word for that. I mean with a spoiler, this is just a reduction in excitement and engagement. But a lot of online spaces can be far more intense in what they do to your emotions.
I also find it interesting that the harm can be the information itself (no matter how it is presented), or the presentation, or maybe just repetition with minimal variations? E.g. I have difficulties pinpointing the particular information I gain from reading online spaces occupied by people who are violent or depressed that I would characterise as hazardous (there is no truth that they know that I find inherently compelling; I could point to something like “many people are sad” or “many people hate people like me” or “there are many reasons to despair”, but saying them now, I do not find them that depressing), yet I find it impossible to spend extensive time in such spaces without my mood tanking. I’ve always thought brain washing techniques sounded silly, but I wonder now whether the repetition itself eventually does convince your brain that there is something to it. There was that interesting finding with Facebook content moderators who basically spend their whole workday looking at flagged content, and a lot of them… became conspiracy theorists, or paranoid, or started making ever more edgy jokes, their behaviour and thinking started changing. When they would explain the conspiracy theories, they did not have any particular compelling information. They had just read them repeatedly from all sorts of people, referenced as known and obvious, until their brain began to shift.
I agree that it’s inconvenient that these two concepts are often both referred to with the same word. My opinion is that we should settle on using “infohazard” to refer to the thing you’re proposing calling “sociohazard”, because it’s a more important concept that comes up more often, and you should make up a new word for “knowledge that is personally damaging”. I suggest “cognitohazard”.
I think you’ll have an easier time disambiguating this way than disambiguating in the way you proposed, among other reasons because you’re more influential among the people who primarily think of “cognitohazard” when they hear “infohazard”.
My personal exposure to the term “infohazard” comes primarily from fiction where it referred to knowledge that harms the knower. (To give an example I recently encountered: Worth the Candle.)
My model predicts that getting scholars to collectively switch terminology is hard, but still easier than getting fiction authors to collectively switch terminology. I don’t think there’s any action that could plausibly be taken by the LessWrong community that would break the associations that “infohazard” currently has in fiction.
Even if you could magically get all the authors to switch to “cognitohazard”, I don’t think that would help very much, because “infohazard” is similar enough that someone who isn’t previously aware of a formal distinction between them is likely to map them onto the same mental bucket.
If I had godlike powers to dictate what terms people use, I wouldn’t use any term containing the word “hazard” to refer to information that is harmless to you but that someone else doesn’t want you to know. This flies in the face of my intuitive sense of how the term “hazard” is commonly used. That’s, like...imagine if some plutocrats were trying to keep most people poor so that they could control them better, and they started referring to money as “finance-hazard” or something; this term would strike me as being obviously an attempt at manipulation. If the person calling something a “hazard” does not themselves want to be protected from it, then I call BS.
One way to change it might be to convince the writers/editors of the SCP Foundation wiki to clarify definitions in their fiction—that seems to be the source of most modern uses of the term, though it’s likely already too late for that.
To me “cognitohazard” seems like a good term for basilisks and their less exotic brethren—things that can somehow mess up your thinking when you hear them—but not for things more like spoilers. I’m not sure “infohazard” is great for that either but it seems less weird to me. (I don’t think I would ever refer to a spoiler as either an “infohazard” or a “cognitohazard”.)
Separately: Perhaps “infohazard” is, at present, unfixably ambiguous and we should use (say) “cognitohazard” for things that are individually harmful and “sociohazard” for things that are collectively harmful, and “infohazard” not at all.
I find the distinction (even within the personal level) interesting.
“Cognitohazard” to me sounds “this will mess up your thinking”.
But quite often, the hazard is that it will mess up your emotional state, and I’d want a different word for that. I mean with a spoiler, this is just a reduction in excitement and engagement. But a lot of online spaces can be far more intense in what they do to your emotions.
I also find it interesting that the harm can be the information itself (no matter how it is presented), or the presentation, or maybe just repetition with minimal variations? E.g. I have difficulties pinpointing the particular information I gain from reading online spaces occupied by people who are violent or depressed that I would characterise as hazardous (there is no truth that they know that I find inherently compelling; I could point to something like “many people are sad” or “many people hate people like me” or “there are many reasons to despair”, but saying them now, I do not find them that depressing), yet I find it impossible to spend extensive time in such spaces without my mood tanking. I’ve always thought brain washing techniques sounded silly, but I wonder now whether the repetition itself eventually does convince your brain that there is something to it. There was that interesting finding with Facebook content moderators who basically spend their whole workday looking at flagged content, and a lot of them… became conspiracy theorists, or paranoid, or started making ever more edgy jokes, their behaviour and thinking started changing. When they would explain the conspiracy theories, they did not have any particular compelling information. They had just read them repeatedly from all sorts of people, referenced as known and obvious, until their brain began to shift.