[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

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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.