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Information Hazards: A Typology of Potential Harms from Knowledge [pdf]

nickbostrom.com

31–34 of 34 posts

Re: Information Hazards: A Typology of Potential Harms from Knowledge [pdf]

#31

Searched for "noble lie" and found...nothing? > Information hazard: A risk that arises from the dissemination or the potential dissemination of (true) information that may cause harm or enable some agent to cause harm. I'm getting the sense there is an underlying loop in the reasoning to support this concept of hazard, where the direction of truth and information seems confused. There's also the question of the durab…

I think you need to read more carefully. For example, he explicitly anticipates and puts aside some questions you ask:

"In this paper, we will not be concerned with postmodernist critiques of the idea of objective truth nor with skeptical doubts about the possibility of knowledge. I shall assume some broad commonsensical understanding according to which there are truths and we humans sometimes manage to know some of these truths."

Re: Information Hazards: A Typology of Potential Harms from Knowledge [pdf]

#32
post #16

I'm not sure if it would be classed as a "neuropsychological hazard" but one form of information hazard I encountered in recent years is true information that requires a finessed understanding of both risk and psychology to not act rashly upon it. For example, let's say you get a brain scan out of curiosity only. A small aneurysm is detected with a confidence of 95%, and said aneurysm, if real, has an estimated annua…

Great scenario, it perfectly encapsulates what you're talking about. The way I like to short-circuit this problem is to ask a bunch of experts what they would do if they had the same information, except applied to their own life. As long as you preface it with a promise not to hold them responsible for their answer, they'll often give better advice than the "official recommendation" that they were giving moments befo…

Physicians as a group are notoriously bad at statistics and prone to err on the side of over treatment.

Re: Information Hazards: A Typology of Potential Harms from Knowledge [pdf]

#33
post #3

I’ll check the comments here later and hopefully someone will have told me whether this is safe to read.

What would you consider unsafe to read?

I think they were joking about a fictional cognitive risk that could crash your brain. There are real cases of information that glitches your brain, like the McCollough effect. Can something exist that glitches the cerebral cortex instead of the visual cortex?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect

Re: Information Hazards: A Typology of Potential Harms from Knowledge [pdf]

#34
Ignorance is bliss for the sheeple,

the bostromian creed wails.

To feel empowered, wagging their sheepdog tails.

To please their masters, by protecting the herd,

from the ever lurking, black sheep nerd.

Fuck OFF ye lousy boffins!

edit: /me howls Total transparency, or BUST!

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