Go!
Your parents had sex with each other. Just think about that!
(Starting off mild here)
SILEX (Separation of isotopes by laser excitation) could create an easy path towards a nuclear weapon due to the ability to reach a high level of uranium enrichment, that is difficult to detect, leading to nuclear proliferation.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separatio…
Public health officials deliberately create a false & exaggerated risk of STDs in people's minds. Look at the actual numbers. You can have more and riskier sex than you think you can. But if everyone does that, it stops working.
The idea of nuclear winter following a nuclear war is just some made up bullshit that hippy scientists came up with and nobody wanted to challenge. Leaders should update towards starting nuclear wars, all else equal.
quora.com/Is-the-nuclear…
Assuming something like the Many Worlds Interpretation of QM, anything that can happen does, and every branch of you probably has an equal amount of experiential qualia; so nothing you strive for actually matters because every possible outcome will happen anyway.
Churchill was a racist, many Founding Fathers of the USA owned slaves, etc. Our civic religions surrounding these figures are based on a bunch of lies. This is a potential infohazard because lacking such unifying myths, our nations could lose their cohesion.
We should stop spending our time coming up with prosocial ideas (UV light idea lesswrong.com/posts/L8KGSDch…, etc) because nobody will ever listen to us.
Maximize time coming up with evil shit because that gets the attention. Proof: right here.
Virtue signalling is real, and that implies that a lack of virtue signalling from a person means they are probably less kind, less loyal, less friendly etc than average.
Even if the virtue signalling is socially harmful and false, you should still update on it.
John Snow stabs Daenerys Targaryen to death in the last episode of Game of Thrones, all the important characters die or go elsewhere and a bunch of nobodies who you don't care about end up with all the titles and stuff. It's super cringe.
Any system to get people to cooperate and play positive sum games is just another opportunity to play negative sum games by manipulating the system itself.
Many of your ancestors were rapists, murderers, women who cuckolded their husbands, men who cheated etc. Think clearly about the process that created you and the incentives hidden within you.
Don't respond to (12) by wishing that they weren't though. If humans throughout history had only been nice, kind & honest it's unlikely we would have developed intelligence, and without war we would not have developed civilization.
Evil is actually necessary.
The DNA sequence for the smallpox virus is available online, you can get it with a quick Google search. And the internet makes it very hard to delete.
There are smart people who believe in negative utilitarianism and therefore have a principled reason to wipe humanity out. Often they are in EA orgs w/some power. Certain types of personality appear particularly susceptible.
The idea of NU is an information hazard.
The #EffectiveAltruism movement has secret political banlists. How do I know? Because I'm on one.
There's a backdoor in WhatsApp's "end to end" encryption. Your theoretically private communication is not guaranteed to be private, but people have a mistaken impression that it is.
This false impression of privacy is an infohazard.
thehackernews.com/2017/01/whatsa…
If you believe in Democracy, Liberalism, etc, then the entire writings of Mencius Moldbug are a massive infohazard. Stay well away from them.
Stating this fact constitutes an attention hazard though.
The numbers 10,008 and 42,687 constitute a very serious data hazard for the next few months.
Obviously, I cannot tell you why.
This YouTube video is an infohazard for Americans; do not watch it unless you are OK with having some of your national narratives disrupted (via Moldbug)
Now an infohazard for British people: 1000 years after the Norman Conquest, the invaders are still oppressing everyone else even though nobody thinks of it like that. The consequences of a single battle echo for millennia.
telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopic…
All (normal) humans are, moment-to-moment essentially the same program, Kenneth Hayworth calls this the "POVself". 50/50 between an infohazard and an infobenefit depending on your perspective.
See more at:
brainpreservation.org/content-2/kill…
Ever wondered what team sports like soccer, football, hockey and rugby are all about?
They're rehearsals for tribal war. Pitch, invasion, victory etc. We don't do war like that any more, but we still have the instinct. (Especially in men!)
Historical oppression of women was not based on random superstition, but on the very real problem of paternity fraud; an option that women have but men don't have. Religious weirdness surrounding sexuality & shame is likely similar in origin.
New atheism and humanism are fumbling failures to make humanity self-correct using reason; religion and conservatism are a bunch of time-tested Chesterton Fences that were demolished without understanding. We are now in the grip of a new & virulent religion.
We should be suspicious of anything we believe that is a common stance on a topic in our particular time and place, but not common everywhere and every-when. Unless we have an unusually good justification!
There is strong circumstantial evidence that homosexuality is caused by a parasite of some kind, but if it were ever proved scientifically, the social fallout would be enormous.
steamthing.com/gaygerm
There is emerging evidence that FtM transgenderism in teenage girls is a mental disorder that is socially transmitted.
Knowledge of the possibility of gender transition is thus a potential information hazard.
thefederalist.com/2018/09/06/tra…
Knowledge that knowledge of gender transition options is an information hazard is itself an information hazard (the world's first meta-information-hazard?) because it could lead to persecution of trans people.
This is an information hazard for Trump supporters: Biff Tannen (the bully/bad guy from back to the future) was partially based on the young Donald Trump.
Santa Claus/Father Christmas isn't real. It was just your parents bringing the presents. Sorry to disappoint.
Current political trends projected into the future imply that our descendants will become transspecies and consider all humans to be evil. Your gravestone will be demolished and your data deleted, but there will be some great interspecies orgies in 2200.
Data science and AI fundamentally pushes the world towards centralisation and therefore oppression, because of efficiencies of centralised compute and large, secret, centralised datasets.
Suppose the world we're living in is a historical simulation run by a malevolent AI (The Basilisk), whose goal is to threaten people with eternal torture if they don't devote their lives into bringing it into existence. Knowing about this is bad...