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.
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.