A point of clarification on infohazard terminology

On reflection, I think I maybe need to give some justification for why I object so strongly to muddying the terminological waters. Also, this and the preceding comment are directed at MichaelA and Convergence Analysis, not at eukaryote (I put it in the wrong thread, sorry).

Anyone who's been educated in a technical field knows what it's like to encounter a really nasty terminological tangle. Over decades, lots of different terms build up for lots of related but distinct terms, many of which are similar even though their referents are importantly different, or different even though their referents are the same. Teachers spend a lot of time untangling these terminological difficulties, and students spend a lot of time being confused by them. They also make explaining the issues to laypeople much more difficult than they need to be. Even though a better, simpler terminology would clearly be preferred, the costs of switching are nearly always greater than the costs of sticking with convention, and so terminological confusion tends to get worse over time, like junk DNA accumulating on a genome.

This will almost inevitably happen with any intellectually tricky field, but we can at least do our best to mitigate it by being aware of the terminology that has gone before and making sure we pick terms that are minimally likely to cause confusion. We certainly shouldn't deliberately choose terms that are extremely similar to existing terms, even though their meaning is very different. Especially if the issue has been brought to your attention, since this provides additional evidence that confusion is likely. Deliberately trying to repurpose a term to mean something importantly different from its original meaning is even worse.

In the case of the various Europe-associated councils, it would clearly have been desirable for the namers of later ones to have stopped and tried to come up with a better name (e.g. one that doesn't involve the word "council", or provides some additional distinguishing information). Instead, they decided (perhaps with some justice, I don't know) that their usage was better, ploughed ahead, and now we're stuck with a horrible confusing tangle.

Ditto this case with "meme hazards" and "memetic hazards". The meaning of "memetic hazard" is somewhat established (insofar as anything in this field is established). But those proposing "meme hazard" think (with some justice) that their usage makes more sense, and so want to try and override the existing usage. If they fail, we will have two extremely similar terms persisting in the culture, meaning importantly but confusingly different things (one roughly a subset of info hazards, the other a superset). We'll all have to spend time first understanding and then explaining the difference, and even then someone will occasionally use "meme hazard" to refer to (the established meaning of) "memetic hazard" or vice-versa, and confusion will result. And all this will have been avoidable with just slightly more considerate choice of new terminology.

There are plenty of other terms one could use for the superset of information hazards that includes false information. I've previously suggested some in the past (communication hazard, concept hazard); I'm sure more could be come up with with a little effort. I'm not convinced the superset concept is important enough to be worth crystallising into a term at all, but I wouldn't be too surprised if I'm wrong about that. Even in that world, though, I think one still has a duty to pick terms that are optimised to avoid confusion, rather than (as in this case) to cause it.

[Edited to remove "idea hazard" as a suggestion, since MichaelA correctly pointed out above that it has a different meaning, and to remove inflammatory language I don't endorse.]

I'd say the first, third, and fourth of those options sound too broad - they don't make it clear that this is about info. But I think something in that direction could be good (e.g., I proposed in a top-level comment "self-affecting info hazards"). I also think the term Anders Sandberg uses is acceptable.

Mostly I'd just want to steer away from using a term that sounds like it obviously should mean some other specific thing (which I'd personally say is the case for "memetic hazards").