Re:Rationality: From AI to Zombies
by Strilanc on Friday March 20, 2015 @05:48PM
(#9240878)
"Information hazard" is just a term for "things you or others learn and then are worse off because of". Examples of information hazards:
- Instructions on how to make a gigaton bomb with processes and materials anyone can acquire and assemble privately.
- A reachable-by-a-country mechanism for blowing up the sun.
- An image designed to temporarily or permanently mess with your vision. Sharing [1] on reddit as a "cool optical illusion" would be mean.
- Probably whatever a computer spits out if you give it a scan of your brain and set it on the task of finding a paragraph/image/movie/whatever that maximizes dopamine production.
- Some people would consider a devastating argument against free will to be an information hazard, predicting that people would then do whatever they wanted because they "couldn't be blamed".
- If you're a hardcore atheist: religions. If you're a hardcore theist who thinks the devil is out to trick you: convincing arguments against belief.
- Instructions on how to make a gigaton bomb with processes and materials anyone can acquire and assemble privately.
- A reachable-by-a-country mechanism for blowing up the sun.
- An image designed to temporarily or permanently mess with your vision. Sharing [1] on reddit as a "cool optical illusion" would be mean.
- Probably whatever a computer spits out if you give it a scan of your brain and set it on the task of finding a paragraph/image/movie/whatever that maximizes dopamine production.
- Some people would consider a devastating argument against free will to be an information hazard, predicting that people would then do whatever they wanted because they "couldn't be blamed".
- If you're a hardcore atheist: religions. If you're a hardcore theist who thinks the devil is out to trick you: convincing arguments against belief.
1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollough_effect