information hazard

English

Etymology

Coined by philosopher and writer (born 1973) Nick Bostrom.

Noun

information hazard (plural information hazards)

1. (philosophy) A risk arising from the dissemination of true information.
   • 2011 August, Nick Bostrom, “Information Hazards: A Typology of Potential Harms from Knowledge”, in Review of Contemporary Philosophy, volume 10, →ISSN:

     Information hazards are risks that arise from the dissemination or the potential dissemination of true information that may cause harm or enable some agent to cause harm. Such hazards are often subtler than direct physical threats, and, as a consequence, are easily overlooked.

   • 2018 October 4, Ed Yong, “A Controversial Virus Study Reveals a Critical Flaw in How Science Is Done”, in The Atlantic:

     He thinks the scientific enterprise needs better norms around potentially dangerous information. First: Don’t spread it. Second: If someone tells you that your work represents an information hazard, “you should seriously respect their call.”

   • 2019 May, Gregory Lewis with Piers Millett, Anders Sandberg, Andrew Snyder‐Beattie, and Gigi Gronvall, “Information Hazards in Biotechnology”, in Risk Analysis, volume 39, number 5, →DOI, pages 975–981:

     In cases where one expects a few highly sophisticated bad actors, easy‐to‐discover information hazards can be shared widely: good actors may benefit, and bad actors likely already know or are likely to rediscover the information hazard themselves.