What are the best examples of significant harm caused by "infohazards"? (don't say Roko)
I tend to internally roll my eyes when I hear this concern, often from EA-land, and I'd like to inoculate myself against that if appropriate.
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Does, say, Marxism count as an infohazard and the ensuing revolutions significant harm?
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It's a reasonable point, but just to define my jargon here, I'm referring to "infohazard" as Bostrom coined it—a risk arising from the spread of *true* information.
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I brought it up mostly because several people have rather convincingly argued that it was much closer to a “truth we couldn’t handle” than actual “falsehood”. Agree with the overall sentiment though.
Just musing instead of answering your question:
No information is intrinsically an infohazard, and nothing at all is intrinsically a hazard.
Arrow-making and nuke-making can be deadly or laughable, depending what else is known.
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In Iain Banks’s Culture series, ships find it trivial to nullify nuclear weapons, even as they detonate.
You can set them off, but nothing seems to happen.
Their power is contained and transported somewhere unobtrusive, like a bit of spilled water.
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I feel like some schools of philosophy would roll their eyes at trying to use "truth" to make your definition any more precise (I'm not one of them, but it's fun to think about)