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Comment by evan_ | Hacker News Reader

I was just listening to NPR this morning, and the announcer said they were going to talk about last night's Mad Men finale- and if I was concerned about spoilers, I should turn the radio off.

That's the level of concern that our society places on potentially ruining the ending of a TV show. For some reason when we apply the same principle to being respectful to people who don't want to relive a trauma they themselves lived, it's ridiculous.

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>For some reason when we apply the same principle to being respectful to people who don't want to relive a trauma they themselves lived, it's ridiculous.

Part of the ridiculousness is that although it's relatively easy to know when you would be spoiling a show, anything can be a trigger. So it isn't even possible to supply a meaningfully comprehensive "trigger warning".

> Part of the ridiculousness is that although it's relatively easy to know when you would be spoiling a show, anything can be a trigger.

Except that we know the most common triggers are depictions of rape; depictions of child abuse; and depictions of war.

This is a slippery slope argument, and in this case it doesn't make any sense. We can't know every trigger, but it'd be pretty surprising if a description of rape wasn't one.

Your argument has the same flaws as the argument that we should give up on trying to understand the programs we write because "Rice's theorem".

Below you will find a list (in no particular order) of common trigger warnings. If discussing one of these things, it is considered common courtesy to put a simple “Trigger Warning: [Subject]” before a post.

Please note: This is a work in progress. If there are any triggers you feel are missing, please feel free to drop us an ask.

    Swearing
    Rape
    Abuse (physical, mental, emotional, verbal, sexual)
    Child abuse/pedophilia
    Self-injurious behavior (self-harm, eating disorders, etc.)
    Talk of drug use (legal, illegal or psychiatric)
    Suicide
    Descriptions/pictures of medical procedures (even if they don’t contain blood or gore)
    Descriptions/pictures of violence or warfare (including instruments of violence, such as knives or guns)
    Corpses, skulls or skeletons
    Needles
    Discussions of -isms, shaming, or hatred of any kind (racism, classism, hatred of cultures/ethnicities that differ from your own, sexism, hatred of sexualities or genders that differ from your own, anti-multiple, non-vanilla shaming, sex positive shaming, fat shaming/body image shaming, neuroatypical shaming)
    Any time slurs are used (this includes words like “stupid” or “dumb”, which are still widely considered to be socially acceptable)
    Trans* degendering, or anti-trans* views of bodies
    Dismissal of lived oppressions, marginalization, illness or differences
    Kidnapping (forceful deprivation of/disregard for personal autonomy)
    Discussions of sex (even consensual)
    Death or dying
    Spiders
    Insects
    Snakes
    Vomit
    Pregnancy/childbirth
    Blood
    Serious injury
    Trypophobia (Link is safe.)
    Scarification
    Nazi paraphernalia
    Slimy things
    Anything that might inspire intrusive thoughts in people with OCD

Source: http://privilege101.tumblr.com/triggers.html

Trigger Warning: The following post may contain something which might trigger some reaction from someone. Descriptions of possible triggers can be triggering, and are thus omitted here.

The more you need to warn against the less useful the warning becomes. Eventually you either have a massive list like a drug side-effect label that nobody reads or you have an extremely generic warning like the one above.

This post may contain swearing (depending on your choice of swear words) or inspire intrusive thoughts in people with OCD. Belgium.

I've heard this "spoiler" point before, but it fails to understand why people don't like trigger warnings in the first place.

Triggers are an excuse to avoid hearing, thinking or discussing uncomfortable ideas. Spoiler warnings are for people who want to savor the experience on their own time. Two preemptive warnings to bail out of a conversation, but for almost opposite reasons.

In this post Enlightenment era, the sharing and discussion of ideas is sacrosanct. Giving someone an Out rubs people the wrong way by violating such a fundamental principle. Discomfort is not an excuse.

So it's exactly the frivolity of TV that made society embrace the spoiler warning. But not without some "this is really stupid" consternation. Given some "everything else being equal" reasoning, and the fact anyone taking the warning will watch the show and be ready to talk about later, spoiler warnings became a thing.

It's easy to define a spoiler: Any description of an event in a fictional work which would be difficult to predict and that has significant consequences.

It's very difficult to determine what trigger warnings should be used in a general case. Should pictures of dogs (especially German shepherds) carry a trigger warning because dogs are often used as attack animals by police and militaries, and can cause traumatic experiences in someone attacked by them? What about birds? I have an acquaintance who is deathly afraid of birds. How about warnings for people with ideophobia (the fear of ideas)? Or all the other things on http://phobialist.com/ or any other such list. Who decides what list of triggers is legitimate?

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