The dangers of a high-information diet

FUD. People can always do something bad. Hiding information from them so they cannot do something bad such as recreating influenza from 1918 is a horrible idea in my opinion, and intuitively seems like an impossible task anyway.

"The invention of spiked clubs, triremes, longbows, gunpowder and all the other military technologies can be traced to the discovery of new information."

Well, I am splitting hairs here but it isn't really a "discovery" when you wake up one morning with a monolith in your front yard, a monolith that somehow helped you kick your neighbor's butt.

Summary: Too much information is bad for you because someone might use it to do something bad.

When reading about scientific history, I noticed that many times, it was noted that several scientists stumbled across the same fact independent of one another. Several inventors independently conjured up similar solutions to a given problem years apart. These days, startup founders find that someone else may have had the same idea not long before (or not long after) they did.

I have a feeling that many of us are somewhat in the "information wants to be free" camp (some to a higher degree of fanaticism than others). I fail to see how keeping information secret will keep other people from independently reproducing, reverse-engineering, discovering or inventing the same.

I think this is the only thing I can be fanatical on, I am hard pressed to devise a theoretical piece of information I would not wish to be exposed to, no matter it's nature. That which does not kill us makes us stronger, and information can't kill you.

Well, directly, anyway. :)