Good question/point! I definitely didn’t mean to imply that EAs were the first people to recognise the idea that true information can sometimes cause harm. If my post did seem to imply that, that’s perhaps a good case study in how easy it is to fall short of my third suggestion, and thus why it’s good to make a conscious effort on that front!
But I’m pretty sure the term “information hazard” was publicly introduced in Bostrom’s 2011 paper. And my sentence preceding that example was “It seems to me that people in the EA community have developed a remarkable number of very useful concepts or terms”.
I said “or terms” partly because it’s hard to say when something is a new concept vs an extension or reformulation of an old one (and the difference may not really matter). I also said that partly because I think new terms (jargon) can be quite valuable even if they merely serve as a shorthand for one specific subset of all the things people sometimes mean by another, more everyday term. E.g.,”dangerous information” and “dangerous knowledge” might sometimes mean (or be taken to mean) “information/knowledge which has a high chance of being net harmful”, whereas “information hazard” just conveys at least a non-trivial chance of at least some harm.
As for whether it was a new concept: the paper provided a detailed treatment of the topic of information hazards, including a taxonomy of different types. I think one could argue that this amounted to introducing the new concept of “information hazards”, which was similar to and built on earlier concepts such as “dangerous information”. (But one could also argue against that, and it might not matter much whether we decide to call it a new concept vs an extension/new version of existing ones.)
Good question/point! I definitely didn’t mean to imply that EAs were the first people to recognise the idea that true information can sometimes cause harm. If my post did seem to imply that, that’s perhaps a good case study in how easy it is to fall short of my third suggestion, and thus why it’s good to make a conscious effort on that front!
But I’m pretty sure the term “information hazard” was publicly introduced in Bostrom’s 2011 paper. And my sentence preceding that example was “It seems to me that people in the EA community have developed a remarkable number of very useful concepts or terms”.
I said “or terms” partly because it’s hard to say when something is a new concept vs an extension or reformulation of an old one (and the difference may not really matter). I also said that partly because I think new terms (jargon) can be quite valuable even if they merely serve as a shorthand for one specific subset of all the things people sometimes mean by another, more everyday term. E.g.,”dangerous information” and “dangerous knowledge” might sometimes mean (or be taken to mean) “information/knowledge which has a high chance of being net harmful”, whereas “information hazard” just conveys at least a non-trivial chance of at least some harm.
As for whether it was a new concept: the paper provided a detailed treatment of the topic of information hazards, including a taxonomy of different types. I think one could argue that this amounted to introducing the new concept of “information hazards”, which was similar to and built on earlier concepts such as “dangerous information”. (But one could also argue against that, and it might not matter much whether we decide to call it a new concept vs an extension/new version of existing ones.)
All good points!