An information hazard (also known as an infohazard) is a risk arising from the spread of true information. The concept was introduced by Nick Bostrom in a 2011 paper.[1]
An important ethical and practical issue is how information hazards should be treated. To what extent should people suppress acquisition and dissemination of information which may cause harm? The answer to this question both depends on one’s moral views—for instance, whether new knowledge is good in itself, or whether it is wrong to restrict personal liberty—and on one’s empirical views of what the outcome of such suppression is likely to be.
Further reading
Aird, Michael (2020) Collection of all prior work I found that seemed substantially relevant to information hazards, Effective Altruism Forum, February 24.
Many additional resources on this topic.
Bostrom, Nick (2011) Information hazards: a typology of potential harms from knowledge, Review of contemporary philosophy, vol. 10, pp. 1–35.
Piper, Kelsey (2022) When scientific information is dangerous, Vox, March 30.
Sandberg, Anders (2020) Anders Sandberg on information hazards, Slate Star Codex meetup, July 5.
Related entries
accidental harm | misinformation | unilateralist’s curse
- ^
Bostrom, Nick (2011) Information hazards: a typology of potential harms from knowledge, Review of Contemporary Philosophy, vol. 10, pp. 1–35.