“Basic facts” as “safe discussion topics”: Ooh, I disagree! I think this heuristic doesn’t always hold, especially for people writing on a large platform.
For basic information, it is sometimes a good idea to think twice if a fact might be very-skewed towards benefiting harmful actions over protective ones. If you have a big platform, it is especially important to do so.
(It might actually be more important for someone to do this for basic facts, than sophisticated ones? They’re the ones a larger audience of amateurs can grasp.)
If something is already widely known, that does somewhat reduce the extent of your “fault” for disseminating it. That rule is more likely to hold for basic facts.
But if there is a net risk to a piece of information, and you are spreading it to people who wouldn’t otherwise know? Then larger audiences are a risk-multiplier. So, sometimes spreading a low-risk basic thing widely could be more dangerous, overall, than spreading an high-risk but obscure and specialist thing.
It was easy for me to think of at least 2 cases where spreading an obvious, easy-to-grasp fact could disproportionately increase the hazard of bad actors relative to good ones, in at least some petty ways. Here’s one.
Ex: A member of the Rajneeshee cult once deliberately gave a bunch of people food poisoning, then got arrested. This is a pretty basic fact. But I wouldn’t want to press a button that would disseminate this fact to 10 million random people? People knowing about this isn’t actually particularly protective against food poisoning, and I’d bet that there is least 1 nasty human in 10 million people. If I don’t have an anticipated benefit to sharing, I would prefer not to risk inspiring that person.
On the other hand, passing around the fact that a particular virus needs mucus membranes to enter cells seems… net-helpful? It’s easier for people to use that to advise their protective measures, and it’s unlikely to help a rare bad actor who is sitting the razor’s-edge case where they would have infected someone IF ONLY they had known to aim for the mucus membranes, AND where they only knew about that because you told them.
(And then you have complicated intermediate cases. Off the top of my head, WHO’s somewhat-dishonest attempt to convince people that masks don’t work, in a bid to save them for the medical professionals? I don’t think I like what they did (they basically set institutional trust on fire), but the situation they were in does tug at some edge-cases around trying to influence actions vs beliefs. The fact that masks did work, but had a limited supply, meant that throwing information in any direction was going to benefit some and harm others. It also highlights that, paradoxically, it can be common for “basic” knowledge to be flat-out wrong, if your source is being untrustworthy and you aren’t being careful...)
“Basic facts” as “safe discussion topics”: Ooh, I disagree! I think this heuristic doesn’t always hold, especially for people writing on a large platform.
For basic information, it is sometimes a good idea to think twice if a fact might be very-skewed towards benefiting harmful actions over protective ones. If you have a big platform, it is especially important to do so.
(It might actually be more important for someone to do this for basic facts, than sophisticated ones? They’re the ones a larger audience of amateurs can grasp.)
If something is already widely known, that does somewhat reduce the extent of your “fault” for disseminating it. That rule is more likely to hold for basic facts.
But if there is a net risk to a piece of information, and you are spreading it to people who wouldn’t otherwise know? Then larger audiences are a risk-multiplier. So, sometimes spreading a low-risk basic thing widely could be more dangerous, overall, than spreading an high-risk but obscure and specialist thing.
It was easy for me to think of at least 2 cases where spreading an obvious, easy-to-grasp fact could disproportionately increase the hazard of bad actors relative to good ones, in at least some petty ways. Here’s one.
Ex: A member of the Rajneeshee cult once deliberately gave a bunch of people food poisoning, then got arrested. This is a pretty basic fact. But I wouldn’t want to press a button that would disseminate this fact to 10 million random people? People knowing about this isn’t actually particularly protective against food poisoning, and I’d bet that there is least 1 nasty human in 10 million people. If I don’t have an anticipated benefit to sharing, I would prefer not to risk inspiring that person.
On the other hand, passing around the fact that a particular virus needs mucus membranes to enter cells seems… net-helpful? It’s easier for people to use that to advise their protective measures, and it’s unlikely to help a rare bad actor who is sitting the razor’s-edge case where they would have infected someone IF ONLY they had known to aim for the mucus membranes, AND where they only knew about that because you told them.
(And then you have complicated intermediate cases. Off the top of my head, WHO’s somewhat-dishonest attempt to convince people that masks don’t work, in a bid to save them for the medical professionals? I don’t think I like what they did (they basically set institutional trust on fire), but the situation they were in does tug at some edge-cases around trying to influence actions vs beliefs. The fact that masks did work, but had a limited supply, meant that throwing information in any direction was going to benefit some and harm others. It also highlights that, paradoxically, it can be common for “basic” knowledge to be flat-out wrong, if your source is being untrustworthy and you aren’t being careful...)