Good question/āpoint! I definitely didnāt 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, thatās perhaps a good case study in how easy it is to fall short of my third suggestion, and thus why itās good to make a conscious effort on that front!
But Iām pretty sure the term āinformation hazardā was publicly introduced in Bostromās 2011 paper. And my sentence preceding that example was āIt seems to me that people in the EA community have developed a remarkable number of very useful concepts or termsā.
I said āor termsā partly because itās 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.,ādangerous informationā and ādangerous knowledgeā might sometimes mean (or be taken to mean) āinformation/āknowledge which has a high chance of being net harmfulā, whereas āinformation hazardā 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 āinformation hazardsā, which was similar to and built on earlier concepts such as ādangerous informationā. (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/ānew version of existing ones.)
Good question/āpoint! I definitely didnāt 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, thatās perhaps a good case study in how easy it is to fall short of my third suggestion, and thus why itās good to make a conscious effort on that front!
But Iām pretty sure the term āinformation hazardā was publicly introduced in Bostromās 2011 paper. And my sentence preceding that example was āIt seems to me that people in the EA community have developed a remarkable number of very useful concepts or termsā.
I said āor termsā partly because itās 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.,ādangerous informationā and ādangerous knowledgeā might sometimes mean (or be taken to mean) āinformation/āknowledge which has a high chance of being net harmfulā, whereas āinformation hazardā 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 āinformation hazardsā, which was similar to and built on earlier concepts such as ādangerous informationā. (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/ānew version of existing ones.)
All good points!