(This post is kind of a draft but idk it's a thing. Some amount of it was written by ChatGPT but I don't remember which part. Good luck!)

My definition of an infohazard is information that causes harm to a person who “consumes” it but importantly the information itself is harmful. As a counter-example, the information “turn right” when following that direction would cause someone to crash their car into a lake isn’t an infohazard because the information itself is not the hazard, only the lake/car accident is. In other words, we will not consider information that encodes a hazardous action an "infohazard", although if you intend to act, it most certainly is hazardous. One difficulty in the study of infohazards is not one-shotting yourself with something unexpectedly hazardous. The student of infohazards is a very brave explorer indeed, taking their mind into their own hands.

General Features

• Rapid onset (the catastrophic) vs slow growth (the incidious)
• reversable vs irreversable

Types of Infohazards

Snowcrash type hazards (the og)

• No known general examples
• Flashing lights vs epileptics

Infinite Jest type hazards

• Entertained to death
• The Spectacle
• TikTok, online porn, AI generated spectacles

“Stunning Awareness” type hazards

• this is where info causes you to become aware of something so much so that you become obsessed/crazy etc
• Meditation practices
• TLP
• Addictive Thought Patterns: “Once you think about this, you’ll never stop thinking about it.” Tetris Effect-type phenomena, but applied to things that degrade mental health.

contagious mental illnesses

• anorexia, transgenderism, other alternative sexual practices, suicide, depression, anxiety, OCD, "internet autism"

demotivational content

• self-depricating "humor"
• Mental Models that Break Agency: Ideas that cause a loss of agency or willpower. This can be extreme determinism (“you don’t really make choices, it’s all physics”), nihilism, depressive realism, or just convincing yourself that you’re doomed to fail at everything.
• Reality Distortion Hazards: Info that makes you see the world in a more distorted way—e.g., reading too much crime news and becoming convinced your neighborhood is dangerous when it’s statistically fine.

Epistemic Hazards (Cognitive Traps)

• Wrong, but Sticky Information: Some info is false but compelling—urban legends, pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, cult indoctrination materials, ideological rabbit holes. Once absorbed, these distort one’s worldview and are hard to shake.
• Overly Persuasive Frames: Certain ways of phrasing things, even if technically true, can alter perception in misleading ways. Think of how the framing of statistics (e.g., “X doubles cancer risk” without context) can mislead.
• Solipsistic Hazards: Ideas that undermine belief in reality itself. Some flavors of philosophical skepticism, extreme relativism, or certain interpretations of simulation theory could fall here.
• extreme Bayesianism

Self-Reinforcing Memes

Some ideas are structured to defend themselves. For example, “if you doubt this, that proves you’re brainwashed” or “the fact that you think you’re not infected means you’re infected.” Cult doctrines, extremist beliefs, and certain psychological models (e.g., “everyone has trauma and if you deny it, that’s proof you’re repressing it”) operate this way.

Hyperreality Traps

• Situations where the map overtakes the territory. Internet social dynamics where people believe they are in an apocalyptic war despite zero physical consequences in the real world.
• "humor programming", laugh tracks

Information That Restructures the Mind

Some ideas force you to adopt a framework in which old ways of thinking become inaccessible. Gödel incompleteness for philosophy; certain deep linguistic relativity concepts (Sapir-Warhf hypothesis); exposure to extremely compelling but alien moral frameworks; integrated family systems "counseling".

Meta-Hazards (The Hazard of Knowing About Hazards)

Is the idea of an infohazard itself hazardous? The more you become aware of infohazards, the more you realize you might already be infected by one, or might get that curious itch to go looking for them. At some point, the study of infohazards itself could become an infohazard. Curiosity killed the cat and all that, after all.

Stay safe/sane out there!