In a recent periodic review of my investment portfolio, I focused on the mistakes made (particularly in DeFi yield-farming) over the years. It made me wonder if they would've taken place if I did not learn about their existence at all. In that if I willfully stay ignorant about DeFi and hold only ETH, would I have done better and save more time?

Had I been consuming infohazard? Worse, had I been producing it?

I see this term thrown around, I've never taken it seriously. My unexamined instinct says more information is better than less. Too much info is a filtration-problem, doesn't make it hazardous. Water isn't hazardous, too much water might be. But one drop of mercury in your throat will be hazardous.

Exceptions do exist in very narrow scopes, say when plausible deniability is involved. If knowing something makes me legally or ethically liable, then it potentially is infohazard and I'm better off not knowing that. This however is hardly applicable to my games I can pretty much ignore it.

Looking at the results of my bets, I started to doubt if I was wrong and I should take infohazard more seriously.

So I went about breaking down what make an info hazardous. And sorry to me, I ended up exactly where I started. Spoiler: I was right, there is no such thing as infohazard.

First, some categorical hierarchy. There is data, then there is information, and finally there is knowledge. Collections of raw data make up one piece of information; pieces of information is synthesize abstracted into one piece of knowledge. Data is a row in a Postgres table; knowledge/idea is what Immanuel Kant made up.

Infohazard strictly addresses information.

So what makes an information hazardous? It's really quite simple: acquiring it gives no upside, deliver only downsides.

Bad information (nutritionally, not factually) can potentially kill your focus, drives you off your track, muddles your mental models, paralyze through excessive optionality, stoke envy and cost you valuable time.

The same info however can be nutritionally bad to me yet good for you. If an info is not universality bad, does it make it hazardous? Not in my mind.

One can argue for knowledge-hazard though, in that there may exist ideas that are universally bad, say communism.

So long as an information carries the potential for an upside for someone, it's not infohazard. And that potential always exists for someone.

And that's true for everything in my info diet. Only in my case I'm not the one who gets to exploit the info for profit most of the time.

Factual information is only as hazardous as you make of it.

My suspicion is the term infohazard is weaponized by pro-censorship folks. Secondly it's an awesome fictional concept of an informational kill-switch that murders an entire civilization; think Bird Box.

The only real hazard is action, that's where the buck stops. Circling back to my bad bets, I can only pin it poor risk management. I don't get to blame the tweets that prompted me to take the plunge.