Authors: Megan Crawford, Finan Adamson, Jeffrey Ladish

Special Thanks to Georgia Ray for Editing

Biorisk

Most in the effective altruism community are aware of a possible existential threat from biological technology but not much beyond that. The form biological threats could take is unclear. Is the primary threat from state bioweapon programs? Or superorganisms accidentally released from synthetic biology labs? Or something else entirely?

If you’re not already an expert, you’re encouraged to stay away from this topic. You’re told that speculating about powerful biological weapons might inspire terrorists or rogue states, and simply articulating these threats won’t make us any safer. The cry of “Info hazard!” shuts down discussion by fiat, and the reasons cannot be explained since these might also be info hazards. If concerned, intelligent people cannot articulate their reasons for censorship, cannot coordinate around principles of information management, then that itself is a cause for concern. Discussions may simply move to unregulated forums, and dangerous ideas will propagate through well intentioned ignorance.

We believe that well reasoned principles and heuristics can help solve this coordination problem. The goal of this post is to carve up the information landscape into areas of relative danger and safety; to illuminate some of the islands in the mire that contain more treasures than traps, and to help you judge where you’re likely to find discussion more destructive than constructive.

Useful things to know already if you’re reading this post:

Bostrom’s paper on Information Hazards, and the more general categorization schema from this LessWrong overview.
It would also be useful to refresh yourself on the meaning of the Unilateralist’s Curse.

Much of the material in this also overlaps with Gregory Lewis’ Information Hazards in Biotechnology article, which we recommend.

Risks of Information Sharing

We’ve divided this paper into two broad categories: risks from information sharing, and risks from secrecy. First we will go over the ways in which sharing information can cause harm, and then how keeping information secret can cause harm.

We believe considering both is important for determining whether or not to share a particular thought or paper. To keep things relatively targeted and concrete, we provide illustrative toy examples, or sometimes even real exampl

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