I did find this post clear and useful; it will be my main recommendation if I want to explain this concept to someone else.
I also really like your proposition of “potential information hazards”, as at that point in the post, I was wondering if all basic research should be considered information hazards, which would make the whole concept rather vacuous. Maybe one way to address the potential information hazards is to try to quantify how removed are they from potential concrete risks?
Anyway, I’m looking forward to the next posts on dealing with these potential information hazards.
And yes, I think that section you point at was important, and I David Kristoffersson for pushing me to attend to that distinction between actual harms, “information hazards” (where it’s just a risk), and “potential information hazards” (where we don’t have a specific way it would be harmful in mind, or something like that). (He didn’t formulate things in that way, but highlighted the general issue as one worth thinking about more.)
I did find this post clear and useful; it will be my main recommendation if I want to explain this concept to someone else.
I also really like your proposition of “potential information hazards”, as at that point in the post, I was wondering if all basic research should be considered information hazards, which would make the whole concept rather vacuous. Maybe one way to address the potential information hazards is to try to quantify how removed are they from potential concrete risks?
Anyway, I’m looking forward to the next posts on dealing with these potential information hazards.
Thanks! That’s great to hear.
And yes, I think that section you point at was important, and I David Kristoffersson for pushing me to attend to that distinction between actual harms, “information hazards” (where it’s just a risk), and “potential information hazards” (where we don’t have a specific way it would be harmful in mind, or something like that). (He didn’t formulate things in that way, but highlighted the general issue as one worth thinking about more.)
Just so you know, we’ve now (finally!) published the post on how to deal with potential information hazards over on LessWrong.
We’ll be putting most of our posts on the topic on that forum, as part of a “sequence”.