Interesting Links for 08-01-2023

[andrewducker]

1. The Power of Indulging Your Weird, Offbeat Obsessions

(tags:obsession science research advice viaPatrickHadfield )

2. Trigger warnings for innate parts of people's lives are not a good idea

(tags:triggerwarnings minorities )

Comments

[calimac]

On the one hand, putting trigger warnings on anything that's likely to bother anybody is purely impactical.

Thought on that line: are spoiler alerts a form of trigger warning? What's being triggered is different than what's normally marked by such warnings, but it functions in the same way: warning people off something they might not want to cast their eyes upon, lest it have a negative effect on their mental functioning.

On the other hand, the answer of "if you don't want to see it, just avoid forums where it's likely to come up" is far too glib. How do you know where it's likely to come up? And the avoiding can cripple your life. My unwillingness to sell my soul to Mark Zuckerberg keeps me off FB where much of life is going on these days.

On that line of glibness, people have told me that if I don't like the Jackson movies, just avoid them. How the heck am I supposed to do that? I'd have to stop reading you; they come up occasionally. I'd have to drop out of all Tolkien discussion, because I don't know of any labeled "no movie talk here." I'd even have to quit my job editing a Tolkien journal, because while we don't publish movie stuff (mostly: we've got an article in the next issue comparing a specific technical aspect in the book and movies), without knowing the movies I wouldn't be able to be on the alert for movie assumptions seeping into discussions of the book.

[andrewducker]

I agree that we can't warn about everything. But on the other hand we can tag things pretty well. I think that spoiler alerts and trigger warnings are both essentially kinds of tags. Is there a big difference between "#spider" and "Trigger Warning: Spider" other than that the latter has an expectation associated with it?

And yes, I agree that you can avoid things a certain amount, but it gets trickier the more you want to avoid them, and definitely has side-effects.