Readit NewsPeople would be less susceptible to disinformation if they could actually trust mainstream sources like the NYT.
The only time such an argument had been yielded and has some value is in my (not so, I guess) humble opinion when I think Fermi used the argument that if there was a lower energy level of water there surely would have been an animal by now that used this extra energy by converting water to this state (although I cannot find a link to this quite so quickly, so perhaps the argument was slightly different).
I think it's fair to assume that there are potentially asymptotic limits to what can be achieved, but it's not that we default to one conclusion or the other, but that we conclude that whatever might be the real solution, the complexity of the proof is insurmountable or doesn't exist.
See: US behavior towards communists and left wing groups during the Cold War, or censorship during WW1 and WW2. The whole "fire in a crowded theater" trope comes from the unanimous Supreme Court decision upholding the conviction of someone peacefully distributing fliers protesting the draft in WW1[0]. Funny how that one usually doesn't make it into the history books.
0 - Schenck vs. United States. Thankfully no longer good law.
it applies to a wide range of traumas and responses some of which might be more or less extreme, so it does include some small things: if you ever get a minor burn, the idea of touching a potentially hot surface might make you somewhat uncomfortable - you could call that a triggering experience even though it's not nearly as intense as the other examples.
Triggering experiences are generally considered to reinforce trauma and generate unncessary distress and should therefore be avoided
And so we use trigger warning before movies etc to warn users of potentially upsetting/triggering content such as war, torture, sexual violence and various forms of abuse, it's really not that big of a deal
For example, if you're about to present a movie to a captive audience that involves depictions of rape, it would be good that someone who has experienced rape, especially recently, knows that it will ahead of time and has the ability to opt-out because it might trigger a traumatic episode. The circumstances where you have a captive audience and it's not clear from the context what will be depicted are actually quite rare, so its usage should be rare.
But young people, trying to signal their virtuous compassion and understanding to like-minded individuals, would put "trigger warnings" at the top of blog posts about things like "racism" or "homophobia", and all that would be discussed would be that they overheard a slur at the store.
At some point, the dominant use of trigger warnings was by people with thin skins, ready to get offended on behalf of "victims" who had suffered, at worst, nothing more than people being rude or mean to them. Pretending like these kinds of negative encounters are anything close to the mind-breaking trauma of getting raped or watching your fellow soldiers explode in front of you is disgusting, and eventually everyone caught on that the activists were trying to equivocate real trauma with "hurt feelings". Worse, they were effectively teaching young people to internalize and exaggerate negative experiences so that they could identify as someone with PTSD. That doing this made them unique and gave them extra attention from others who wanted to actively show compassion to victimized people. For lonely young people who want a cause, it was extremely attractive because it gave them identity, purpose, and community. But in reality, it was largely a perverted roleplay which coddled everyone involved and made them emotionally fragile.
The original concept of trigger warnings is solid, but should be practiced only where necessary and never attached to the phrase "trigger warning", as that nomenclature has been ceded to the activists.
The article headline suggests there's a "shift" but doesn't really go into enough detail to explain why a shift from relationships based on duty to relationships based on fulfilment would fuel estrangement. A little more data on that would be helpful.
Heck, there is a huge amount of social pressure pushing 18 year old kids to do this. They can’t possibly know better, but the adults encouraging such reckless behavior really should not be doing this.
Schools that have always graduated successful people with valuable degrees will prosper, and schools which prey upon idealistic young people will quickly find themselves only able to entertain rich dumb kids.
It's an indirect solution which will fix future and past wrongs, without giving any University the right to sue. It doesn't impose any unreasonable burden on institutions, other than the most reasonable one, that they're giving young people educations that actually have value.
It's like the US tax code... it is insanely complicated and in a lot of ways doesn't serve the public well (because rich folks can use the complexity of it to escape taxation), so it's easy and popular to say let's just get rid of it and start with a new, simple tax code.
The problem is it got to be the way it is for a reason. We want to incentivize people to own homes and buy electric cars and a thousand other things, and we use the tax code to do that. If you tear it down without a plan on how to keep incentivizing all the things you want, you're going to end up with some undesirable results that you then have to fix.
It's fine to say let's throw it out and start over, but if that's as far as your plan goes then it's pretty lazy.
[If we want] to incentivize...
While it's true that incentivization necessitates tax code complexity, we don't all agree on the necessity of incentivization in the first place.
40,273 cases/1M pop (better than 49 states)
597 deaths/1M pop (better than 48 states)
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
https://data.sfgov.org/stories/s/COVID-19-Cases-and-Deaths/d...
In the era of small local book stores, the store owner had large discretion on what to stock. Different book stores would naturally stock different books and cater to different preferences. The customer would have options to discover new books, but would also have popular books sometimes "hidden" by the book sellers preference.
If every book reader is hooked into the same recommendations/search feed will they naturally move to reading the same books?
Further, every modern author is competing with every author who ever lived. I could read the science fiction you wrote last year or I could read Asimov, Herbert, Card, etc. and they're often cheaper and more socially relevant.
Reddit's system works that if a post get 1000 upvotes and 500 downvotes (66% liked), it will be scored worse than a post than gets 10 upvotes and 0 downvotes.
Basically what it does is penalize controversy, which is the perfect decision for a website that is about mining the most humorous and widely-liked response.
Anything that is 51% liked and 49% disliked (e.g. political individuals mentioned in a non-political thread) gets bombed to the bottom almost immediately, which is exactly what most redditors want.
The other brilliant thing it does it let the user adjust this prioritization if they so desire.
Reddit's system encourages purity spirals, especially when the main topic of discussion is how terrible everyone else is.