Infohazards
Certain types of knowledge, that, by the very act of knowing it, can lead the knower to harm of some fashion, directly or indirectly.
The harmful effects may come from. but is not limited to:
- The knower misusing their newfound knowledge (eg. plans for a DIY nuke)
- The knower becoming the target of a third party related to the knowledge (eg. discovering govt. secrets and being targeted by state-funded hitmen.)
- The knower developing pathological habits as a result of this new knowledge.
- The knower's entire worldview being destroyed or at least destabilized by their discovery (eg. HP Lovecraft's entire ouvre)
- The knower being fed so much information that they lose sight of more important information. (eg. mainstream social media) For this particular type of infohazard, one must practice SIFT
We have come to a point where one of the largest tech companies in the world profit off of distributing infohazards:
And one of the consequences of how Facebook is picking out that content today is it is -- optimizing for content that gets engagement, or reaction. But its own research is showing that content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing, it's easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions. ~
The Semantic Apocalypse can be thought of as a humanity-spanning infohazard in which all meaning has been made erased.
Subliminal messages are also something to be wary of:
In order to influence decision-making in real-life situations, subliminal messages must be stored for long-term after only a few exposures, e.g. after a single confrontation with a subliminal TV advert. Furthermore, messages must be stored even if they contain complex relational information that requires semantic integration, such as “politician X will lower the taxes.” For subliminal manipulation to be effective, humans thus have to be able to semantically integrate and rapidly store unconscious pieces of novel information into long-lasting associative memories that can be retrieved if relevant to the context of a later decision. ~