[motohagiography]

Searched for "noble lie" and found...nothing?

> 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.

I'm getting the sense there is an underlying loop in the reasoning to support this concept of hazard, where the direction of truth and information seems confused. There's also the question of the durability of a given state of truth.

What is the difference between information and fear? (e.g. data about potential information) When and how is information realized into truth, and in turn, consequences? Given we know truth is not a necessary or sufficient condition to have consequences, what are the qualities of information that does? If there were no truth, and in turn, only narratives and struggles for power, is an information hazard just something that hinders your will to power?

Admittedly I find Bostrom's writing mostly impenetrable because he seems to publish things he's still sounding out and I don't quite detect the hand of an editor, but while this idea of a hazard seems interesting, I don't see that he's testing for or discovering its existance so much as coining and supporting a meme. Perhaps I've just missed it.

[playdead]

I think you need to read more carefully. For example, he explicitly anticipates and puts aside some questions you ask:

"In this paper, we will not be concerned with postmodernist critiques of the idea of objective truth nor with skeptical doubts about the possibility of knowledge. I shall assume some broad commonsensical understanding according to which there are truths and we humans sometimes manage to know some of these truths."