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Nornagest comments on Open Thread February 25 - March 3 - Less Wrong
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My psychologist said today, that there is some information that should not be known. I replied that rationalists believe in reality. There might be information they don't find interesting (e.g. not all of you would find children interesting), but refusing to accept some information would mean refusing to accept some part of reality, and that would be against the belief in reality.
Since I have been recently asking myself the question "why do I believe what I believe" and "what would happen if I believed otherwise than what I believe" (I'm still pondering if I should post my cogitations: they interesting, but somewhat private) I asked the question "what would happen if rationalists believed otherwise than what they believe". The problem is that this is such a backwards description that I can't imagine the answer. Is the answer simply "they would be normal people, like my psychologist"? Or is it a deeper question?
Did your psychologist describe the type of information that should not be known?
In any case, I'm not completely sure that accepting new information (never mind seeking it out) is always fully compatible with rationality-as-winning. Nick Bostrom for example has compiled a taxonomy of information hazards over on his site; any of them could potentially be severe enough to overcome the informational advantage of their underlying data. Of course, they do seem to be pretty rare, and I don't think a precautionary principle with regard to information is justified in the absence of fairly strong and specific reasoning.
No, it was more of a general statement. AFAIR we were talking about me thinking too much about why other people do what they do and too little about how that affects me. Anyway - my own wording made me wonder more about what I said than what was the topic.
Many thanks for the link to the Information Hazards paper. I didn't know it existed, and I'm sort of surprised that I hadn't seen it here on LW already.
He mentions intending to write a follow-up paper toward the end, but I located the Information Hazards Bostrom's website and I don't see a second one next to it. Any idea if it exists?