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If it's a great value then why isn't that effort being directed entirely towards google products? I get the argument you're making I think, that it's free valuable labor. But if that's true then what explanation is there for primarily publishing about competing products? Even if the argument was purely user safety then surely there would be no reason to publish unpatched problems publicly which has happened in the past and seems like the sort of thing that group like P0 could have chosen to handle in a more graceful fashion. Somewhere in the chain of command is a reason for why P0 focuses where it does and it doesn't seem likely that the reason is "Because we're rolling in gold and Apple and Microsoft could use the money."

I'd need to know what you mean by manipulative and why it seems negative in this context, I apologize because I feel like that might seem sort of pedantic but education as a field has a very large collection of practices that could easily be described as manipulation. At the same time, I'm worried manipulation seems like the right word because I've been focusing mainly on surprise content to establish a fast example for the discussion even though what I've really been trying to drive at is the way that trigger warnings and their implementation/expection impacts the teacher-student dynamic.

I think in general we agree that most lessons don't really need to be surprising, emotionally provacative, etc. But the reason I've been focusing on those examples is because it's not too hard to understand why a professor might choose to employ them situationally (the basic answer being showmanship that drives engagement of some sort). A similar but very different example would be something like a Sex & Gender course, I've only taken a few such courses but the first one really stuck with me because one of the early assignments was simply for students to break into same sex (technically gender presentation but we didn't know that concept yet) groups of two and hold hands in public with our partner for ten minutes. I could certainly see an argument for giving someone with a history of abuse a pass on this assignment but should the instructor have included a trigger warning in their syllabus calendar about it? The point of the assignment, as the professor acknowledged, was in part to make us uncomfortable and aware of how our discomforts might be tied to social prejudice.

You're right of course that this is all just theory. Real life is, well, it's real life it's nuanced and expecting some amount of situational accommodation isn't something I'm against. After all, if a professor offers office hours why shouldn't a student be able to use that time as part of how they work around content that's emotionally challenging for them? At the same time, and I guess what I should have led with in retrospect, my issue with a lot of solutions about trigger warnings or even just content consideration in general is that it's presented as a victimless accommodation when the dynamic from the instructor's side seems to favor watering down content for the entire class so that you don't have to sift through the chafe so to speak. I don't know what a good middleground solution is, and I do think it's worth pursuing one, but as far as trigger warnings specifically I don't think the benefits have been shown to be worth the trade.

I agree that none of the examples I gave would lose much of their impact, but I'd argue that's also not directly tied in to the ovarching point I was trying to express (though obviously I expressed it badly or else that's where the focus would be).

It's easy to point to any one example and say "Well that could still work." but the point I was trying to drive at is that this changes the dynamic of the lecture. Surprise can be used as a catalyst for introspection or introducing a strategic amount of discomfort to illustrate a point, etc. the point I was trying to make is simply that it has utility. When you are /required/ to have a trigger warning, as an instructor, you are being obligated to compromise the effect you were trying to persue and presumably you were trying to persue it because you thought it would help the class with some form of comprehension whether that be intellectual or emotional.

Even if you're not outright required to issue trigger warnings (lets say because a middle ground policy is implemented that encourages instructors to do so but leaves it to their discretion) those instructors are still required to adapt to triggered students or else they wouldn't have been encouraged/required to do so in the first place. But because there's no reliable way to know what specific content will trigger a student in a given class the system is actually incentivizing censorship because now the only way to ensure you minimize trigger events is to assume that every student is triggerable and so optimal content becomes content which is as unchallenging, emotionally speaking, as possible.

Allergies wouldn't be a terrible analogy. Lots of schools, in America I can't speak for Europe and elsehwere, have regulations about common allergies like peanuts. These regulations are targeted towards common allergies because otherwise the task of preventing allergic reactions becomes an all encompassing battle to minimize liability. That's not to say students with rare allergies shouldn't be accommodated at all, but at some point the impact on the other students has to be addressed.

>What is material that is supposed to capitalize on surprise?

It's a hard one to answer but I'll give the answers I can from my time in university. It's hard mostly because each instructor handles the material differently so often examples are oneshots.

With regard to sociology and anthropology, the Nacirema are often presented as a real tribe at first. Many students will realize what's happening, but the point of the assignment is to encourage students to realize that from the outside even their own culture is strange and in this way, so the idea goes, they are better able to view things from a neutral position because of this lesson on cultural introspection.

Other examples could be things like literature readings of classical texts. Many students are uncomfortable saying the N-Word, for obvious reasons, but censoring it diminishes the significance of the word and while that's not a bad thing in day to day life it's nonetheless bad if your goal is to impart on your students a sense of what weight that word carried in its historical context.

Movies are another good example. There are lots of classic movies that get shown to illustrate a point but part of the point is a conclusion that's arrived at over the course of a movie. On my mind when I say this is the short movie about a teacher who basically invents racism by telling her class children with one color of eye are better than the others and then later she reverses this decision. In both cases the children treated the inferior group overall worse and none of them liked being the inferior group.

>These things are rarely core issues of lectures, triggers based on what I read can be completely random things (not actual depictions of rape, but smell, sound color) which may make them useless for most.

This is ultimately the core point. Triggers are nuanced and often specific to the individual. There's no easy way to know in advanced what might set something off and so encouraging trigger warnings is ultimately encouraging censorship of long practiced content (whether that censorship is outright or in the form of encouraging a hopefully less confrontational presentation of the content which diminishes the emotional impact of the lesson).

Why is this a consent issue? Lots of intro to sociology classes do a lesson on the Nacirema, race and violence are massive components of studying mid 20th century literature, and plenty of other fields of study have lessons that are meant to convey an emotional context and not just an informational one and they do this often with surprise elements. Labeling that as traumatic and non-consensual glosses over the part where the main people who seem to be reporting trauma from these lessons are people who already had trauma and are clearly still influenced heavily by it or they wouldn't need trigger warnings. Calling it a consent issue frankly is just a dog whistle.

And if skipping the lecture is a valid choice for learning then why does the professor need to be contacted afterwards? The professor already selected the information they felt was relevant and presented it in the fashion they felt was the most useful to the class. Your viewpoint only seems to make sense if the default assumption is that emotional information isn't a priority for the instructor but that doesn't jive with how a large swathe of the humanities and social sciences are often taught.

It feels like wasted effort in this context then. The article talks a lot about the university setting specifically, you can't just not engage with your course material and expect to have the same educational outcomes as someone who did. It seems like it'd be more effective for majors to list their trigger warnings before the course even starts with the understanding that if you can't handle the content then you should probably choose a difference major. Likewise, it limits the teacher's options because suddenly material that is meant to capitalize on surprise elements becomes a liability since it's unvetted.

If you're not interested in debating their intentions then why frame it as a donation? That by itself is a normative judgement in this context, and the reason I brought up framing, since normally two primary characteristics of a donation are that it can be refused and that it is being offered in good faith.

This is the same general point that the original comment you had replied to was making which itself was an explanation of why people are distrustful of P0 even if the brass tax is positive for the end user. It's fine if you don't find that political side of it interesting but it's not as simple as just being a donation.

I'm curious to know why you feel like regulation and standards are the solution here. It seems fairly clear that the propaganda metagame heavily favors disinformation and is only getting better at creating disinformation products. If we accept that premise, then it seems like the real problem is that we're still trying to preserve the idea that the internet is a tool for learning. Certainly parts of the internet are, but if the bloggers vs. professional press are anything to go by then it seems like the most practical solution is to establish lists of trusted entities and the contexts in which they're trusted. The managing of lists is regulatory in a sense but the trust side of the equation seems more social than bureaucratic, people need to be much less trustful of the internet.

It sounds like the idea that it's a donation is the part where we fundamentally disagree then. If you expose an unpatched exploit and the number of people using that exploit goes up because of your publication then you've contributed to worsening the security landscape for whoever the relevant user is. If an exploit is years old, or if there's some other relevant context, then sure exposing a vulnerability mainly means that the parent company doesn't have to pay for the research. But it's not a favor they asked you to perform and if you have a competing product with that company then the question becomes "Why aren't you publishing more about yourself?" since surely no one is in a better position to do security research on your products than yourself or a contractor you hired. It's basically PR motivated research and when there's also a lack of transparency it leads to easy speculation that maybe you're holding back research on yourself purposefully or even simply not publishing the more damning research you discover about your own products.

I think this really comes down to expectations. Imo, Tesla is a luxury brand. I get that some people feel like the Model 3 is a Tesla for the common man but the common man is either buying used or they're buying something that can be reliably fueled. That being said, and the reason for saying it, in the world of luxury brands idea matters too. The idea that an electric vehicle can compete on most of the spec sheet with a combustion/hybrid engine is sexy to people with futurist enthusiasms because electric things are being pushed as the sexy eco-friendly future right now. Obviously that's all just my own opinions, but I've yet to see much else to explain Tesla's balance sheets (plain incompetence isn't something I'm willing to buy into from the CEO that's working at innovating the astro services market as we speak).

This is a fair criticism, and in line with the comment I replied to, but I still don't know if I agree with the overall sentiment of cynacism. While I'll give you the leaks about Prism/Five Eyes/Mail Espionage (the original government surveillance!), etc. the same documents are in line with what a pattern of being motivated by a fear of being unprepared to defend the greater society from upheaval would look like. Obviously metric gaming is the self serving side of that desire, and I'm being a bit of a devil's advocate here, but a department that doesn't receive adequate resources can't perform its function adequately. At the same time, American justice (I don't know much of other systems) has a long tradition of not just being a government product. Our system is designed to be corrected, lawsuits are easy (if funded) because the (ideally) other side of productive authoritarianism is civil resistance (physical sure but also legal punativism). I realize that these aren't reasons to not be cynical of our LEO organizations, but I guess that's why the cynicism seems strange to me, it's also not a reason to doubt the overall outcomes of the justice system. Whistleblowers (and their checkered history sure), civil disobedients (looking at you MLK and Malcom X), plain old litigants (gay marriage) are the counter balances to the sometimes hostile nature of the bureaucratically empowered entities in the American government. Is the system perfect? Obviously not, maybe not even optimistically close, but it's certainly not something indicative of a populace motivated purely by metric performance from my perspective.

From what you've said it seems like the difference is more an issue of framing. You're focused on the effects for the end user, which are the same no matter what in my opinion and I agree on that. At the same time, if you're publishing exploits that are cutting edge and primarily only apply to the competition then, because you (in this hypothetical) are a company, the overall effects of the research are self serving. Why not publish more vulnerabilities that apply to your own systems otherwise? Surely you (again, the hypothetical you) are in a better position than other entities to engage in introspective research that benefits the end user. Obviously there's a possibility that the explanation is "Because the competition has more flaws than our/my own product" but without evidence such is the case then there isn't a lot of reason for outside critics to give the benefit of the doubt. Also, I'm not a security researcher so I realize some of my points might not be accurate to the state of the industry. I'm moreso trying to highlight the lines of thinking that lead to criticism of P0 and why I don't think they're easy to refute without a certain degree of burden on Google's/Totallyrelatedbutnot-google's part.

I'd like to hear more about this if you don't mind expounding on it some. I realize that in a certain light that's how it looks (I'm no stranger to a lot of what used to be called conspiracy theories, including the long history of illegal surveillance) but honestly it's always looked to me like the powers that be, in America, genuinely try to operate in a benign fashion. I realize that's not the same as operating in a legal or legally spirited fashion, but I also don't see it as flagrantly hypocritical enough to warrant the cynicism you've presented.

It's only a donation if you assume the vulnerability is not cutting edge, otherwise it doesn't seem unfair to label the disclosure as corrosive to the current zeitgeist in terms of user safety. Just because you've managed to marry genuine research and politics doesn't mean that you've eliminated the more general bias produced by researching/disclosing information about opposing products more frequently than your own. At the same time, this also doesn't mean the system is bad, it could be entirely possible that the status quo of security without adversarial research is much worse for the end user.