Don't use 'infohazard' for collectively destructive info

If Bostrom's paper is our Schelling point, 'infohazard' encompasses much more than just the collectively-destructive smallpox-y sense.

Here's the definition from the paper.

Information hazard: A risk that arises from the dissemination or the potential dissemination of (true) information that may cause harm or enable some agent to cause harm.

'Harm' here does not mean 'net harm'. There's a whole section on 'Adversarial Risks', cases where information can harm one party by benefitting another party:

In competitive situations, one person’s information can cause harm to another even if no intention to cause harm is present. Example:  The rival job applicant knew more and got the job.

ETA: localdeity's comment below [LW(p) · GW(p)] points out that it's a pretty bad idea to have a term that colloquially means 'information we should all want suppressed' but technically also means 'information I want suppressed'. This isn't just pointless pedantry.

My personal exposure to the term "infohazard" comes primarily from fiction where it referred to knowledge that harms the knower.  (To give an example I recently encountered:  Worth the Candle.)

My model predicts that getting scholars to collectively switch terminology is hard, but still easier than getting fiction authors to collectively switch terminology.  I don't think there's any action that could plausibly be taken by the LessWrong community that would break the associations that "infohazard" currently has in fiction.

Even if you could magically get all the authors to switch to "cognitohazard", I don't think that would help very much, because "infohazard" is similar enough that someone who isn't previously aware of a formal distinction between them is likely to map them onto the same mental bucket.

If I had godlike powers to dictate what terms people use, I wouldn't use any term containing the word "hazard" to refer to information that is harmless to you but that someone else doesn't want you to know.  This flies in the face of my intuitive sense of how the term "hazard" is commonly used.  That's, like...imagine if some plutocrats were trying to keep most people poor so that they could control them better, and they started referring to money as "finance-hazard" or something; this term would strike me as being obviously an attempt at manipulation.  If the person calling something a "hazard" does not themselves want to be protected from it, then I call BS.

To me "cognitohazard" seems like a good term for basilisks and their less exotic brethren -- things that can somehow mess up your thinking when you hear them -- but not for things more like spoilers. I'm not sure "infohazard" is great for that either but it seems less weird to me. (I don't think I would ever refer to a spoiler as either an "infohazard" or a "cognitohazard".)

Separately: Perhaps "infohazard" is, at present, unfixably ambiguous and we should use (say) "cognitohazard" for things that are individually harmful and "sociohazard" for things that are collectively harmful, and "infohazard" not at all.

I think this is actually my favorite yet.

Paraphrasing of some of the things Jessica says:

• Bostrom's original definition of "infohazard" covers scenarios of the form "someone would like to suppress this information" in addition to "if you learn this information it will harm you".
• Scenarios where "someone would like to suppress this information" are much more common than "self-infohazard" scenarios.
• When someone wants to suppress information (such as a cult leader who's secretly abusive), it is in their interest to make others believe that it's a "self-infohazard" (including with arguments like "They're not ready to learn how I've been abusing them; it would shatter their worldview"), or possibly a "socio-infohazard" (where it's in people's collective interests to not know the leader's crimes—"It would fracture the community", "Having everyone listen to me brings order and unity and you don't want to ruin that", etc.).

I would add that it's probably best if our vocabulary choices don't make it easy for bad actors to make superficially-plausible claims that suppressing the information they want suppressed is good and virtuous.  I would say that the word "infohazard" itself sounds to me (and, I suspect, to the naive layperson) like the "directly hazardous to me if I learn it" sense.

Therefore, it's probably a bad thing if serious people believe that "infohazard" technically means Bostrom's maximally-broad original definition, because that makes it harder for serious people to protest when e.g. someone says "The fact that some people in our organization screwed up X is an infohazard, so we shouldn't publicly mention it".  Accepting that definition is like creating a motte-and-bailey term.  (Incidentally: Learning that someone has done something bad is usually at least slightly unpleasant—more so if it's a partner or leader—and therefore it's ~always possible to make at least a slight case that "knowledge of my bad behavior" is a self-infohazard.)

I would suggest the following rule as an antidote: Anytime someone says the unqualified term "infohazard", it means "information that I want suppressed"—i.e. we should be suspicious of their motives.  If they have good reasons to suppress information, they should have to state them upfront.  More specific terms might be "social infohazard", "existential infohazard", "cognitive infohazard", etc.  I'll also note Eliezer's suggestion of "secret":

We already have a word for information that agent A would rather have B not know, because B's knowledge of it benefits B but harms A; that word is 'secret'.

By the way, I'm kind of weirded out by the idea that we need short terms that mean "information that should be suppressed" (i.e. in terms of Huffman coding, "we should use a short word for it" = "it is very common"), and furthermore that it's rationalists who are trying to come up with such words.  I think it's ultimately for innocent reasons—that Bostrom picked "information hazards" for the title of his paper, and people made the obvious catchy portmanteau; still, I don't want to push the language in that direction.