Interesting Links for 01-10-2025

[andrewducker]

1. Law firm that dropped trans man agrees to pay damages and costs

(tags:transgender bigotry law uk )

2. Do Trigger Warnings Work?

(tags:mentalhealth psychology triggerwarnings viaPatrickHadfield )

3. What effects does rent control actually have?

(tags:regulation rent doom housing )

4. The dawn of the post-literate society

(tags:society literacy doom )

Comments

[ninetydegrees]

2 I find it interesting that some participants selected an item more often when there was a trigger warning. I'd have liked to hear what they thought of trigger warnings because, to me, their purpose isn't necessarily avoidance or reducing distress. It's often knowing whether I'm ready to read or watch that now. In fandom, we can have very detailed trigger warnings and author's notes, which I think are more useful than vague descriptions, and I can choose how to respond: don't read it, read it later, read it now, skip some parts, etc. It gives me agency: there's some stuff I don't ever wanna read or watch and there's some stuff I can't handle because I learned my lesson. That, to me, is the point of warnings. But I get why it wouldn't work for lots of people. After all, we're inundated with 24/7 anxiety-inducing very real news, that people still watch and wanna know about too the very minute they happen.

[simont]

In fact I can imagine at least two totally different reasons to read a thing immediately based on a trigger warning:

1. I feel anxiety about XYZ and for exactly that reason I need to know what the XYZ news is right now rather than worry all day about what it might turn out to be. (As you say, people who find a current-events topic worrying might reasonably deal with it in lots of different ways, avoidance being only one of the possibilities.)

2. Other people find PQR triggering but I love it! Woohoo, there's some PQR content! (Perhaps for less current-events kinds of thing, such as an animal commonly thought of as scary except some people think it's cute.)

[juan_gandhi]

Thank you. #4 is a little bit self-contradictory (does the literacy cause mass disorders and executions? the author contradicts himself). Another issue is that the author does not seem to see beyond the English-language Western world. What does he know about India, China, even France? Japan? (Japan is the first in the spread of mangas, replacing real books, actually.)

[bens_dad]

4. Nit. Text does not have to be print.
While I admit that there are several degrees of difference between reading and article in a paper magazine and the same article in a web browser on a phone*, the two experiences are still more similar than either is to watching a video of the author speaking on the same content.

* I consider the following ways of experiencing an article to be meaningful different:
reading it in a paper magazine,
reading it on an e-ink reader (such as a Kindle),
reading it in an epub reader on a phone, or
reading it in a web browser on a phone.
Reading it on a desktop or laptop is different again, but is not entirely in the same progression.