Information hazards are risks, typically viewed ex ante
“E.g., writing a paper on a plausibly dangerous technology can be an information hazard even if it turns out to be safe after all.”
This seems confused. It seems the relevant map-territory distinction here is “something could be an information hazard, without us knowing that it is.”
I disagree with “This seems confused”. Bostrom makes it clear that an information hazard is a risk. And I’d say that the most valuable usage* of the concept is ex ante, and subjective/epistemic (in the probability/credence sense); evaluating whether to develop or share some (true) information, based on the chance it could do harm, given what we know/can predict. We can’t know for sure, at that stage, whether it will in fact do harm.
And if the concept meant guaranteed or certain harms from information, then that concept itself would be less useful ex ante, and we’d often want to say “risks of harm from (true) information” (i.e., we’d be back to the same concept, with a longer term).
This is totally in line with how the term risk is used in general. E.g., existential risks are risks even if it turns out they don’t happen. In fact, a lot of people working on them expect they won’t happen, but think just moderately or very low odds are utterly unacceptable, given the stakes, and they want to lower those odds further. In the same way, you can meaningfully talk about your risk of dying in a car crash vs in a plane crash, even though you’ll probably never die in either.
*We can also use the term ex post, to refer to harms that did happen, or times we thought a harm might come to pass but we got lucky or turned out to have assessed the risks incorrectly. (I’d call such actual harms “harms from information hazards”, “harms from information”, or perhaps “information harms”, as you suggest. And this fits neatly with information hazards being risks of harm from information.) But that’s not the only use-case, or (I’d argue) the most useful one.
“E.g., writing a paper on a plausibly dangerous technology can be an information hazard even if it turns out to be safe after all.”
So you’re talking about probability. If a gun has a bullet in one of chambers, but it isn’t known which one, and the rest are empty, then firing it once has the same physical risks as a fully loaded firearm with 1/n probability, where n is the number of chambers. Even if in one instance tragedy does not occur, that doesn’t (necessarily) change the ‘probability’ we should assign in the same situations in the future.
If I’m understanding you correctly, I think you’re indeed understanding me correctly :)
I’m saying, as per Bostrom’s definition, that information hazards are risks of harms, with the risks typically being evaluated ex ante and subjectively/epistemically (in the sense in which those terms are used in relation to probability). In some cases the harm won’t actually occur. In some cases a fully informed agent might have been able to say with certain that the risk wouldn’t have ended up occurring. But based on what we knew, there was a risk (in some hypothetical situation), and that means there was an information hazard.
Information hazards are risks, typically viewed ex ante
I disagree with “This seems confused”. Bostrom makes it clear that an information hazard is a risk. And I’d say that the most valuable usage* of the concept is ex ante, and subjective/epistemic (in the probability/credence sense); evaluating whether to develop or share some (true) information, based on the chance it could do harm, given what we know/can predict. We can’t know for sure, at that stage, whether it will in fact do harm.
And if the concept meant guaranteed or certain harms from information, then that concept itself would be less useful ex ante, and we’d often want to say “risks of harm from (true) information” (i.e., we’d be back to the same concept, with a longer term).
This is totally in line with how the term risk is used in general. E.g., existential risks are risks even if it turns out they don’t happen. In fact, a lot of people working on them expect they won’t happen, but think just moderately or very low odds are utterly unacceptable, given the stakes, and they want to lower those odds further. In the same way, you can meaningfully talk about your risk of dying in a car crash vs in a plane crash, even though you’ll probably never die in either.
*We can also use the term ex post, to refer to harms that did happen, or times we thought a harm might come to pass but we got lucky or turned out to have assessed the risks incorrectly. (I’d call such actual harms “harms from information hazards”, “harms from information”, or perhaps “information harms”, as you suggest. And this fits neatly with information hazards being risks of harm from information.) But that’s not the only use-case, or (I’d argue) the most useful one.
So you’re talking about probability. If a gun has a bullet in one of chambers, but it isn’t known which one, and the rest are empty, then firing it once has the same physical risks as a fully loaded firearm with 1/n probability, where n is the number of chambers. Even if in one instance tragedy does not occur, that doesn’t (necessarily) change the ‘probability’ we should assign in the same situations in the future.
If I’m understanding you correctly, I think you’re indeed understanding me correctly :)
I’m saying, as per Bostrom’s definition, that information hazards are risks of harms, with the risks typically being evaluated ex ante and subjectively/epistemically (in the sense in which those terms are used in relation to probability). In some cases the harm won’t actually occur. In some cases a fully informed agent might have been able to say with certain that the risk wouldn’t have ended up occurring. But based on what we knew, there was a risk (in some hypothetical situation), and that means there was an information hazard.