When Truth Becomes Hazardous: Navigating Information Through the Metacrisis | Frankly 153

**Nate Hagens** (0:00)
Good morning. It is hot and humid July morning here in Minnesota. Feeling refreshed from a short and needed break in a place that was also hot and humid. Back to work. This is an important topic I want to talk about today. It's been a little bee in my bonnet, and I want to outline the importance of not misinformation, but true information. A few years ago, I recorded an episode called The Limits to Podcasting About Limits, and in it, I described what I called a triple information hazard, which was three categories of true things that a person can know but cannot say on a public platform. And in the years since, that list has grown. I now count at least 12 of risks in these categories. So today, I thought I would walk through what I'll refer to as the information hazards of the meta-crisis, because I think understanding them explains a lot about what gets said in our public discourse and what doesn't get said and why. And why it's all important.
Okay, so first a quick definition. An information hazard coined by philosopher Nick Bostrom about 15 years ago is any risk that results from disseminating true information. True things, not lies or misinformation, but true things that have the potential to cause harm if they become widely known. So let me go through some that I've come up with. So the first four of these hazards really all stem from the same uncomfortable fact, which is that when you speak publicly about the meta-crisis or about any issue, you're speaking in front of potentially everyone or everyone with access to the Internet, including the very actors and systems that you are trying to change and steer and influence. But the microphone and now the algorithms, they don't discriminate. So first, the information can endanger the speaker. Then it potentially can protect the powerful. Then it can actually arm and benefit the powerful, not in a planned way. And now in the era of AI, everything we say gets metabolized by the machine, Moloch, the Borg, the superorganism itself, which has implications. So I'm going to take these first four hazards one at a time. So the first one is truth to power. What the Great Simplification platform describes, to use one of many examples, is at its core a coming shift away from the global economic and political order of the last 60 to 80 years. And describing that trajectory too precisely, too close to the bullseye of the drivers and the causes and the logic eventually becomes threatening to the people and institutions whose power depends on the old story continuing. So speaking truth to power, of course, has been dangerous for as long as there have been truth and power. And I've joked before, only partly joking, about not wanting the eye of Sauron turning towards rural Minnesota. The risk isn't about me or TGS, but anyone speaking truth to power in these times. And this hazard lands on the speaker. Because of that, I think it silences voices that you will likely never hear. OK, hazard number two, I'll call the inoculation hazard. Suppose you've worked out a strategy for how ordinary humans, in service of life and the future of a betterment of society, figure out a way to collaborate and outmaneuver concentrated dark triad power. The psychopathic individual and institutional behaviors that currently are steering so much of the economic superorganism in our society. The moment you publish that strategy, the system you're trying to influence sees it, hears it, reads it as well, and immediately develops antibodies. It's kind of like announcing the next football play in the huddle over the stadium loudspeaker. Might be cool for the fans, but the opposing team would immediately shift their defense. So some of the most important strategic thinking happening right now in the world is deliberately not public, and it can't be. And that bothers me quite a bit, as someone committed to transparency and openness and truth. But in order to remain effective and avoid this hazard, some things, by definition, must be left unsaid.
Okay, a related hazard, hazard number three, is for lack of a better term, the dual use hazard. When information is power, a clear synthesis of society's fragilities and bottlenecks and leverage points and the like can both help and hurt your cause. Because the same map that builds community resilience to a different audience also helps a hedge fund position to profit from the current biophysical setup, or helps an opportunist corner a scarce good in the market, or maybe helps even a hostile nation find the weak spots. And I've spent 20 some years trying to draw an accurate map of the human predicament. And I have to live with the fact that metaphorical arsonists can read maps just as well as the metaphorical fire fighters I'm hope I'm speaking to in the TGS audience and probably better, because the arsonists are better funded, more incentivized, and are probably paying closer attention.