As a new longtermist incubator, we at Nonlinear wanted to really understand info hazards before we started launching projects. Below, we share our research. It was originally just for internal use but we felt it was worth sharing publicly.

To help you quickly get up to speed on information hazards, we’ve:

Summarized the most important posts on the topic (see rest of post)
Created a prioritized reading list, inspired by CHAI’s prioritized bibliography
Made a list of potential solutions to info hazards that we found during our research
Made a list of examples of info hazards and the hazards of secrecy (Don’t worry, none of them are “active” info hazards.)

We estimate that it would take you 1-4 hours to read the summaries and the top priority posts. Then you’d be aware of the most important considerations in the topic, so it’s a pretty high value use of time if you’re working in info hazardous areas, such as biorisk or AI safety.

Summaries of top posts on info hazards

Note: notes taken represent the perspective of the author and are not meant as objective statements of fact.

Notes prefaced with CW or FD mean that they are the personal comments of Corey Wood or Florian Dorner respectively.

If you see articles that are missing or think any example info hazards should be removed, let us know in the comments or with a private message.

The research was done by Corey Wood during a summer internship at Nonlinear.

What are information hazards?

Definitional article
Info hazards are only about true information
Info hazards can occur in a wide variety of contexts and can be large or small scale
Some types of info hazards harm only the knower of the information, but info hazards are not limited to this and can harm others as well (which are often the most worrisome ones)
"Something can be an info hazard even if no harm has yet occurred, and there's no guarantee it will ever occur"
If there is no specific reason to believe there's any risk from some true information, and there's just some chance that it could be harmful, it’s best to say it's a "potential information hazard"

Information hazards: Why you should care and what you can do

Proposed heuristic:

If some information you may develop or share is related to advanced technologies or catastrophic risks, then think about how “potent” the information is.

Potency=size. How much effect could the information have?

"The potency of some information

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