Information hazards: why you should care and what you can do

Abstract

We argue that many people should consider the risk that they could cause harm by developing or sharing (true) information. We think that harm from such information hazards may sometimes be very substantial, and that this applies especially to people who research advanced technologies and/or catastrophic risks, or who often think about such technologies and risks. However, constantly worrying about information hazards would be paralyzing and unnecessary. We therefore outline a heuristic for quickly identifying whether, in a given situation, it’s worth properly thinking about the hazards some information might pose, and about how to act given those hazards. This heuristic is based on the “potency” and “counterfactual rarity” of the information in question. We next outline, and give examples to illustrate, a range of actions one could take when one has identified that some information could indeed be hazardous.