[kulahan]

He explains this in the thread - it appears as though trigger warnings only serve to increase anxiety until the trigger is experienced, and at no point does it improve or worsen the experience.

So he analogizes this by saying "Imagine a doctor prescribed you a pill and you asked if it was going to help".

If "Oh no, it won't help, but it might cause some very minor harm." was the response, you'd probably find a new doctor. So why do we do the opposite here?

In reality, you're "being an asshole" with the trigger warnings, assuming you continue doing them knowing now that it does not help, and may actively harm.

[romwell]

>He explains this in the thread - it appears as though trigger warnings only serve to increase anxiety until the trigger is experienced, and at no point does it improve or worsen the experience.

Did it occur to the author that perhaps communicating when the triggering content is going to happen in advance, as well as giving a heads-up right before it to allow the people to make a choice to not experience it would be the thing to try in experiments?

Evidently not.

It feels like the author (and HN) thoroughly misunderstands both the concept of trigger warnings and informed consent.

>So he analogizes this by saying "Imagine a doctor prescribed you a pill and you asked if it was going to help". If "Oh no, it won't help, but it might cause some very minor harm." was the response, you'd probably find a new doctor. So why do we do the opposite here?

This analogy is beyond broken.

Ads for medication are required to include possible side effects. That's a closer analogy.

>In reality,

In the reality of broken analogies and hacks pushing flawed analysis and misunderstanding as research, I am a very sad person.

Let's be better than that.

[kulahan]

>right before it to allow the people to make a choice to not experience it

Of course I did. The point is that it wouldn't matter. You're not scared by the content, you're scared by the potential of that content. Knowing it's the next word would only drive anxiety even higher, even if you decide not to look at what might be a horrific description of my trauma. I mean, it could also be a description of a cute kitten cuddling, but I don't know and humans are risk averse, so the first thought is the worst one.

>It feels like the author (and HN) thoroughly misunderstands both the concept of trigger warnings and informed consent.

I think you've just misunderstood the author's point.

>Ads for medication are required to include possible side effects. That's a closer analogy.

That's a beyond broken analogy. This isn't about advertising potential side effects. It's about a cure which may not work. The cure is analogous to the advertisement. If the ad on the TV were the actually theraputic thing, your argument here might make at least a little sense.

> I am a very sad person

Cheer up - it looks like you're the only one here who can't follow the author's train of thought, but in the future you might wanna run it by someone else to see if they get it instantly or not

[igorbark]

this analogy breaks down on a number of levels.

1. patients invented and self-prescribed the pill originally

2. the doctor has concluded that the pills are harmful by studying what happens who do not have the illness the pills are meant to treat take the pills

3. the doctor didn't really keep track of what doses were given to different patients

i.e.

1. trigger warnings were not originally forced on people, they were created by people who found them helpful to help themselves

2. the studies in the meta analysis are all on general populations, in particular mechanical turk and college students

3. there is no discussion of the different effect different implementations of content warnings can have. for example, the only study that measured physiological responses instead of using self-reported anxiety showed the highest anxiety response. probably, because it also gave a completely general and non-specific content warning that went like this: "The next page has the link to the movie clip. Researchers have been asked to give a trigger warning for the clip". so they showed that when told some arbitrary but highly disturbing thing could happen at any point during a video, people in general will be more anxious when watching the video. and concluded that content warnings are a harmful practice.

[romwell]

Don't forget:

4. The doctor didn't keep track of of how many patients ditched him, forever, because the doc doesn't understand the above

-----

Thank you for a thorough reply and debunking of the argument by broken analogy.

The whole idea of content warnings is giving the audience a choice; it's about informed consent — a concept that both HN and the researcher seem to struggle with.

No shit Sherlock that a content warning of the form "some thing you won't like will happen, BUT I WON'T TELL YOU WHICH THING NOR WHEN IT WILL HAPPEN is anxiety inducing!

For fuck's sake, that's a bad faith thing to say.

How about:

>"Warning: I'm going to talk about rape, about 15 minutes into the talk, for about 5 minutes. I'll give you a heads-up, so you don't have to worry. If you don't want to hear about rape today, you can skip this part and stay with us for the rest."

This is a trigger warning.

It enables informed consent to consume any/all parts of the content.

Similarly, "what follows in 10 seconds is a depiction of rape" is a warning.

A trigger "warning" without the option to opt out of consuming the content warned about isn't a "warning", it's a threat.

And a "warning" that isn't specific about either content or time is torture.

>"Somewhere in this talk, we'll show something that we know you asked us not to show you out of the blue. We'll still show it out of the blue, but we're warning you about it now. No, you can't leave"

— apparently, we need a research article to tell HN that this is fucking bullshit.

The cherry on the pie remains what I said in the first place: that the natural outcome of such "warning" (i.e. lack of warning) is that affected people won't choose to interact with you again — and that's exactly what this study doesn't measure.

[rsynnott]

> it appears as though trigger warnings only serve to increase anxiety until the trigger is experienced

So, I'd see things like this as more warning people that something contains content they might want to _avoid_. The analysis seems to be more about cases where people read the warning and then _consume the content anyway_, but is that really the common case?

[romwell]

>The analysis seems to be more about cases where people read the warning and then _consume the content anyway_, but is that really the common case?

It's not, which is why the entire analysis is BS.

If the subject of the experiment isn't given the choice to opt out, the experiment is flawed.

Is the subject of the experiment is indifferent to the content being warned about to begin with, it is meaningless.

And if not, it's just abuse.