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0 pointsromwell3y ago0 comments

>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.

0 comments

kulahan3y ago

>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

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