Earlier quoted context omitted.
Complaining about things you think are virtue signaling isn't meant to be useful; it's a manner of virtue signalling.
Are you virtue signaling?
That's the joke.
Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material
51–60 of 78 posts
Re: Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that none of the examples I gave would lose much of their impact, but I'd argue that's also not directly tied in to the ovarching point I was trying to express (though obviously I expressed it badly or else that's where the focus would be). It's easy to point to any one example and say "Well that could still work." but the point I was trying to drive at is that this changes the dynamic of the lecture. Surpris…
What I am saying is that this is purely theoretical construct. That fine tuned impactful lesson that is so great, but breaks if I dont know the violence will be there, it does not exist. Not even art works that way. And if it does, it sounds awful lot like something manipulative. Minor red flag wtf is going on manipulative. It is supposed to be college lesson. Edit: I have seen trigger warning I lecture about America…
I'd need to know what you mean by manipulative and why it seems negative in this context, I apologize because I feel like that might seem sort of pedantic but education as a field has a very large collection of practices that could easily be described as manipulation. At the same time, I'm worried manipulation seems like the right word because I've been focusing mainly on surprise content to establish a fast example for the discussion even though what I've really been trying to drive at is the way that trigger warnings and their implementation/expection impacts the teacher-student dynamic.
I think in general we agree that most lessons don't really need to be surprising, emotionally provacative, etc. But the reason I've been focusing on those examples is because it's not too hard to understand why a professor might choose to employ them situationally (the basic answer being showmanship that drives engagement of some sort). A similar but very different example would be something like a Sex & Gender course, I've only taken a few such courses but the first one really stuck with me because one of the early assignments was simply for students to break into same sex (technically gender presentation but we didn't know that concept yet) groups of two and hold hands in public with our partner for ten minutes. I could certainly see an argument for giving someone with a history of abuse a pass on this assignment but should the instructor have included a trigger warning in their syllabus calendar about it? The point of the assignment, as the professor acknowledged, was in part to make us uncomfortable and aware of how our discomforts might be tied to social prejudice.
You're right of course that this is all just theory. Real life is, well, it's real life it's nuanced and expecting some amount of situational accommodation isn't something I'm against. After all, if a professor offers office hours why shouldn't a student be able to use that time as part of how they work around content that's emotionally challenging for them? At the same time, and I guess what I should have led with in retrospect, my issue with a lot of solutions about trigger warnings or even just content consideration in general is that it's presented as a victimless accommodation when the dynamic from the instructor's side seems to favor watering down content for the entire class so that you don't have to sift through the chafe so to speak. I don't know what a good middleground solution is, and I do think it's worth pursuing one, but as far as trigger warnings specifically I don't think the benefits have been shown to be worth the trade.
Re: Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
People aren't dogs to be trained. To an extent, to be human and to recognize other people's humanity is to accept and accommodate their irrationality where doing so isn't particularly onerous to you.
Training works on people; people are animals. To a certain extent, this is what therapy is: helping people train parts of their brains to behave differently.
My point wasn't about whether or not you can train people. My point is that you shouldn't, in general, think of human beings as things upon which you perform training.
There may be certain contexts in which training is an acceptable thing for a person to do or have done to them, but that typically doesn't apply to normal interactions between adult human beings.
Re: Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that we have therapists who are licensed to do this, and who are better at judging progress and when it might be appropriate to progress you. Your average lecturer or teacher is not trained in this way, at least specifically regarding trauma.
The average lecturer was managing a class, but now they need to prescreen individuals for experiences that make them too weak for normal classes? Just about 10 years ago cutting edge therapists were implanting false memories of childhood trauma.. If someone does not seem to need a therapist based on actual behavior then I don't think schools should be inviting lecturers to create pre-screening based on students react…
I don't think lectures need to do all that much work. They just need to think for a bit and warn people "Hey, this could be disturbing." That's pretty much it.
Its not like trigger warnings impose an onerous responsibility on teachers. There isn't any suggestion that they tell their students to get help. Its literally just a "heads up, I'm about to talk about X".
I'm not on a campus, and when I was in was in physics and math classrooms, but its hard to imagine this is that big of a deal.
Re: Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that we have therapists who are licensed to do this, and who are better at judging progress and when it might be appropriate to progress you. Your average lecturer or teacher is not trained in this way, at least specifically regarding trauma.
The average lecturer was managing a class, but now they need to prescreen individuals for experiences that make them too weak for normal classes? Just about 10 years ago cutting edge therapists were implanting false memories of childhood trauma.. If someone does not seem to need a therapist based on actual behavior then I don't think schools should be inviting lecturers to create pre-screening based on students react…
"Hey, this book contains a graphical description of rape" is very low effort, just like how telling somebody that a food you made yourself contains peanuts is very low effort.
The only time lecturers wouldn't know when something might trigger someone is if they haven't actually read or looked at the content that they're about to present, which I find pretty hard to believe.
Re: Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The average lecturer was managing a class, but now they need to prescreen individuals for experiences that make them too weak for normal classes? Just about 10 years ago cutting edge therapists were implanting false memories of childhood trauma.. If someone does not seem to need a therapist based on actual behavior then I don't think schools should be inviting lecturers to create pre-screening based on students react…
I don't think lectures need to do all that much work. They just need to think for a bit and warn people "Hey, this could be disturbing." That's pretty much it. Its not like trigger warnings impose an onerous responsibility on teachers. There isn't any suggestion that they tell their students to get help. Its literally just a "heads up, I'm about to talk about X". I'm not on a campus, and when I was in was in physics…
I think the article covers why simply announcing trigger warnings is not helpful but more importantly why it is not a steady state system.
As I see it this is basically recreating the weaker sex etiquette argument with bias based on experiences instead of gender. All the outrage.of speaking in front of the wrong people, special new requirements, plenty of signalling that you are better than others because they manage the necessary risks to do their job.
Re: Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
The average lecturer was managing a class, but now they need to prescreen individuals for experiences that make them too weak for normal classes? Just about 10 years ago cutting edge therapists were implanting false memories of childhood trauma.. If someone does not seem to need a therapist based on actual behavior then I don't think schools should be inviting lecturers to create pre-screening based on students react…
"Hey, this book contains a graphical description of rape" is very low effort, just like how telling somebody that a food you made yourself contains peanuts is very low effort. The only time lecturers wouldn't know when something might trigger someone is if they haven't actually read or looked at the content that they're about to present, which I find pretty hard to believe.
With a peanut allergy you have it and don't eat the food.
With the trigger warning what exactly? It's easy to announce something you are going to do and do it. The article addresses how pointless and possibly counterproductive that is.
Re: Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material
#58Trigger warnings are incredibly important for PTSD sufferers, and every time people criticize them or make light of them, they forget about the victims of CSA, the veterans, the disaster survivors, and others who struggle daily to manage their mental health.
Re: Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who can be expected to experience increased distress from the topic are much more likely to choose to avoid it, so I'm not surprised in the least by that association. Also from the article: > critics argue that the avoidance of potentially upsetting material is actually a counterproductive approach because it offers no chance to learn to manage one’s emotional reactions. This is wrong. You don't learn to manag…
> I really appreciate trigger warnings on content that includes it. This is fine as long as it's kept within reason like certain more commonly occurring traumatic themes such as sexual violence, etc. Conversely, it's also possible to go too far and let this get out of hand. If, for example, we were to let everyone define whatever they feel may personally trigger or offend them, we could end up with half of everything…
In my experience, content warnings are usually a product of authorial judgement. For instance, I once wrote an article that discussed some people with extremely racist views. It occurred to me that some people might not want to read quotes containing vile, offensive comments about their race (or even someone else's). So I put a warning at the top so that such people wouldn't read the article if they didn't think they could handle it. No one forced me to do it. No one would have come for my head if I hadn't. As far as I can tell, this is the usual case: people put content warnings on their content for reasonable things when they think it's a good idea. I really don't see anything remotely resembling a problem, and I think people only really get upset about content warnings as a proxy for the greater culture war.
Re: Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material
#60I remember some discussion here about databases with a link to CMU's Advanced Database Systems materials. This one perhaps: https://15721.courses.cs.cmu.edu/spring2017/schedule.html#wa... It has this warning: --- The material presented in this lecture uses explicit language and discusses certain situations in database management systems that may be triggering to some students --- After browsing some of the literature…
It's probably because some stupid cunt decided to whine about master/slave terminology as being indicative of microaggression.
Much in the same way @antirez was cowed over the use of such language within the context of Redis.
As if he were abducting sub-Saharan Africans, and auctioning them to cotton plantations himself. It wasn't even anything close to such a sentiment until thought crusaders made it about that, because their own private mind crimes left them feeling icky.
There's a special place in hell, reserved for such purveyors of behavior modification, come the day of reckoning.