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I'm pretty sure that I think "infohazard" is a conceptual dead-end concept that embeds some really false understandings of how secrets are used by humans. It is an orphan of a concept -- it doesn't go anywhere. Ok, the information's harmful. You need humans to touch that info anyways to do responsible risk-mitigation. So now what ?
I think at the meta level I very much doubt that I am responsible enough to create and curate a list of human beings for the most dangerous hazards. For example, I am very confident that I could not 100% successfully detect a foreign government spy inside my friend group, because even the US intelligence community can't do that... you need other mitigating controls, instead.
Yeah, that's a useful taxonomy to be reminded of. I think it's interesting how the "development hazard", item 8, with maybe a smidge of "adversary hazard", is the driver of people's thinking on AI. I'm pretty unconvinced that good infohazard doctrine, even for AI, can be written based on thinking mainly about that!
1davekasten
I think a lot of my underlying instinctive opposition to this concept boils down to thinking that we can and do coordinate on this stuff quite a lot. Arguably, AI is the weird counterexample of a thought that wants to be thunk -- I think modern Western society is very nearly tailor-made to seek a thing that is abstract, maximizing, systematizing of knowledge, and useful, especially if it fills a hole left by the collapse of organized religion.
I think for most other infohazards, the proper approach requires setting up an (often-government) team that handles them, which requires those employees to expose themselves to the infohazard to manage it. And, yeah, sometimes they suffer real damage from it. There's no way to analyze ISIS beheading videos to stop their perpetrators without seeing some beheading videos; I think that's the more-common varietal of infohazard I'm thinking of.