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Comment by woolion | Hacker News Reader

I have been thinking a lot about a notion of self-paradoxical knowledge, meaning knowledge that actively makes your reasoning worse. For example, knowledge of extremely rare diseases causes the mind to over-evaluate their importance by many orders of magnitude (there are many variants of this effect). Or trying to explain some concepts of the object/subject construction tend to use a language that is grounded on the concept of a shared objective reality that furthers from the concept true understanding -- in other words, "the tao that can be named is not the tao".

I didn't think "There Is No Antimemetics Division" did very well with its premise, but the premise is quite fascinating, and it's the closest I've seen to this concept. Are there other explorations of similar ideas?

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> I have been thinking a lot about a notion of self-paradoxical knowledge, meaning knowledge that actively makes your reasoning worse.

There could be a hypothetical class of ideas that just knowing about them is actively harmful. For a fictional example, imagine learning how to detect a hostile alien race that has been living with us on earth all this time. Or if one day we invent a thought experiment that induces psychosis to anyone that tries to unravel it.

I think the keyword for these type of ideas is infohazard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_hazard - the See Also section has a few interesting examples.

I had seen this, but all the examples correspond to having an actual, external threat as a result of this knowledge. I thought more about the buddhist parable that men don't know when they'll die, because only buddhas are able to live with this information. I guess it's very close to 'malinformation', but this is still related to an external actor manipulating what you know with an external goal, rather than intrinsic to the information.

"The Silence" in Doctor Who touches on similar themes. https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Silent#Amnesia_and_hypnotic_a...

The opposite of this is also fascinating to me too. There are false beliefs that make people who hold them better in some metrics. Like, the idea that hard work leads to success. We all know there is some element of luck, but even so, people who discount luck and only believe in hard work tend to do better.

That's a good point. I think this one can be easily be resolved on a factual level, since hard work is one of the few variables you can actually control. But it is more interesting from an emotional point of view, since in many cases that would an article of faith with the implicit fear that it might not be true.

There are variations of this, such as composition theory in art getting good results based on completely false assumptions, but these tend to fall under epistemic underdetermination.

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