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.)

[magedragonfire]

Right? There's some stuff that I just don't ever want to see (phobia for a common animal, okay to read about 'em but seeing them, especially up close, makes me panic), so I like trigger warnings for that and don't click on them if they contain pictures of that thing. Easy! On the other hand, the medical thing I have actual PTSD over doesn't actually set me off unless I'm in a situation where I in particular have to have that procedure (or something similar to it) again. I can read about or see it happening to other people (fictional or non) and be perfectly okay.

Mostly, brains are weird, and people don't process things the same way. I suppose we don't all use trigger warnings the same way, either, judging by the study. :P