firehose

OED Word of the Day: Hand of Glory, n. A charm or talisman made from the dried and pickled hand of an executed criminal

The intelligence community this month quietly released an unprecedented, unclassified five-year-roadmap charting the future of data analysis it wants commercial startups like ride-sharing firm Uber to read.

A Mississippi couple is being accused in a criminal complain of trying to use their honeymoon as means of traveling to Syria to join ISIS. The couple had reportedly planned to first travel to Europe, and then Syria after.

A love song, a lament, it has also been the battle cry for legions of bookish virgins, the supreme validation of the neurotic soul.

New Vision

Yasukuni: Japan's controversial war shrine New Vision Key questions and answers about Tokyo's Yasukuni war shrine, which came under the spotlight on the August 15 anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II, when politicians -- and bereaved families -- visited the site, enraging Japan's neighbours. Important for all to seek reconciliation, move forward: MFA on Japan PM Abe's ...Channel News Asia all 2,772 news articles »

Fox News

A new flag? New Zealand picks 40 best from 10000 designs Washington Post WELLINGTON, New Zealand — New Zealand is considering changing its flag. The public was encouraged to come up with ideas, and submitted more than 10,000 designs. A government-appointed panel has winnowed those down to 40 finalists. A look at the ... New Zealand Presents Forty Alternative Designs for New FlagNovinite.com A brand new flag? New Zealand picks 40 greatest from 10000 designsObserver News New Zealand has 40 ideas for a new flag - and they're awfulStuff.co.nz all 55 news articles »

South African public schools will begin offering Mandarin as an optional second language next year, according to an announcement from the country’s education ministry. The seemingly innocuous addition—more than a dozen other languages from German to Urdu are also being added—has become a rallying point for critics of the government’s close ties with China as well as failure to protect local languages.

“We’ll oppose the teaching of Mandarin in our schools with everything that we have,” the country’s largest teachers union has said of the policy. “We see it as the worst form of imperialism that is going to happen in Africa,” the group’s general secretary, Mugwena Maluleke said. Maluleke said the union would be sending text messages to all its teachers to reject the new policy.

Language is particularly political in South Africa. South Africa has 11 official languages, which include several native south African languages, but English is the dominant language in business and politics. Some efforts have been made to introduce indigenous African languages in the country, but many are not available in schools. The government agency responsible for promoting them, the Pan South African Language Board, is consistently underfunded. Across the continent, only 200 African languages (pdf, p. 21) are used in schools.

Students in South Africa are required to study two languages: a home language—often English or an indigenous language—and a second language. According to the announcement, Mandarin will be gradually introduced in some schools next year and offered to all students between the grades of four and 12 by 2018. Kenya is also considering similar moves, with Mandarin to be offered as a second language possibly in 2017.

Critics of South Africa’s ruling party, which has promoted closer ties between the two countries for years, accuse the government of giving Mandarin priority. Maluleke questioned why the government issued an announcement about introducing Chinese but did not mention the other languages added. “The department must tell us what did they receive from China that they don’t want to be open about it,” he said.

A spokesperson for South Africa’s education department said that the Chinese government would be providing support for teacher training. China has been encouraging the teaching of Mandarin to African students via scholarships to study in China and dozens of government-funded language and culture schools, Confucius Institutes, set up across the continent.

USA TODAY

Has Queen Nefertiti's tomb been found? USA TODAY An archaeologist thinks he may have evidence that the tomb of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti is hidden in plain site. Known for her beauty, Queen Nefertiti has long held a prominent place in ancient Egyptian history. Yet, researchers have been unable to ... Professor believes he found Nefertiti's secret tomb in what could be 'the ...National Post Tomb of Queen Nefertiti found in Luxor?Financial Express Archaeologist Says He May Have Found Nefertiti's TombTIME NOLA.com -The Guardian all 113 news articles »

Irish Times

Amnesty votes to decriminalise sex work and prostitution Irish Times Amnesty International has taken the controversial step of voting for the decriminalisation of sex work and prostitution, as well as for the decriminalisation of the purchase of sex. Up to 500 delegates from across the world passed the resolution on ... and more »

submitted by coastiefish to Thorns
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“Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this,” the bestselling author Dave Eggers once observed.

This is an experience that readers who exclusively consume books on their tablets, e-readers and mobile devices at least partly miss out on. To fully enjoy a book, after all, is not just to chew on the protein of its content but also to admire its presentation on the plate—its size and shape, the thickness of the paper as you turn a page, the faint smell of ink, the texture of the cover and weight of it in your hands.

A Kickstarter campaign launched by Design Observer (which ends today) seeks to champion these first “hand-held devices,” as they put it. Led by two of the design industry’s most respected voices, Pentagram partner Michael Bierut and Design Observers’s founding editor Jessica Helfand, the fundraising campaign will support the publication of a book and a traveling exhibition showcasing this year’s winners of 50 Books / 50 Covers, a design competition that has been running continuously for 92 years.

A planned 300-page “book of books” will be the first printed compendium of winners since Design Observer took over managing the competition from the American Institute of Graphic Arts in 2011.

Publishing the winning book covers digitally just didn’t seem right, the organizers explained, for a competition that seeks to shine the spotlight on the thoughtful, laborious, highly technical behind-the-scenes work graphic designers do to make a physical book come to life.

How books are designed

Aside from reaffirming the cultural significance of the format, the initiative also seeks to underline the design intelligence required to produce a book. Graphic designers act as translators, Helfand explains. The task of a designer is to synthesize information from authors, editors, publishers, critics, investors, and researchers, she explains. “It sounds like fun, but it’s a tremendous amount of work.”

Judging books and covers

With hundreds of entries submitted to the competition, choosing the top 50 is difficult. “What’s the book that’s going to make me happy? That’s my criterion,” Helfand explains. This short video offers a peek into the judging process this year.

Though the project has met its Kickstarter goal as of yesterday (Aug. 11), you can still contribute and show your support for the beautifully designed books. Dave Eggers will be writing the introduction to this year’s catalogue of winners.

Fast growing, vibrant, independent book publisher No Starch Press (nostarch.com) seeks a Marketing Associate. We make technology, programming, math, science, and LEGO fun, and we're looking for someone to help us get the word out.

We publish books for h...
Employer: No Starch Press
Location: San Francisco
Posted: 08/12/2015

gargomons:

“The meaning of this I can’t really say in one word… but one way to look at it is that I wanted to convey the sense of what it means to become an adult. In other words, there are no people with pure hearts in the world of adults. So, what would you do when you realize this? In other words, when you realize that the world of adults is a dirty one where no one with a pure heart can live, would you avoid it and remain as a child where you can live in a world of childish and beautiful dreams? Or, would you enter the adult world regardless even if you knew that it was not a pure world? So, which way are you going to choose?” 

–kunihiko ikuhara, adolescence of utena commentary

Australian architect Max Pritchard's Tree Top Studio looks like the perfect place to work while surrounded by the sights and sounds of trees and water. Read the rest

One pattern involved a lot of convenience foods that a person would likely order from a restaurant, such as pasta dishes, pizza, Mexican food, and Chinese food.

Another pattern involved a lot of plant-based foods, such as vegetables, fruits, fruit juice, cereal, and beans, as well as fish, poultry and yogurt.

The "sweets" pattern included a lot of added sugars, desserts, chocolate, candy, and sweetened breakfast foods.

The "Southern" pattern involved typically Southern food, such as fried foods, eggs, organ meats, processed meats, sugary drinks and foods with added fats.

Finally, researchers saw that some people loaded up on beer, wine, liquor, green leafy vegetables, tomatoes, and salad dressing; they called this the “alcohol and salad” pattern.

Overall, over about six years of follow-up, there were 536 heart attacks, including some resulting in death, the researchers reported in the journal Circulation.

Among people whose diet fell into the Southern pattern, those whose food choices most closely the pattern were 37 percent more likely to have a heart attack during the six years, compared to those whose choices least closely matched it.

The link remained significant even after the researchers accounted for factors often involved in heart attack risk like age, race, education, blood pressure and weight.

The other four dietary patterns were not linked to an increased risk of heart attack, but Shikany said that doesn't mean they're heart-healthy.

"I wouldn’t say go ahead and eat all the convenience food you want," he said.

Among the limitations of the research is the fact that the data used in this study had been previously collected for another study.

However, Shikany said there is likely little risk tied to telling people to try grilled chicken instead of fried chicken every night. Or, cutting back on sweet teas.

"From what I know about it, it’s much more successful when you give people options and not suggest eliminating complete groups of food," he said.
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Sleeping on your side — rather than your back or stomach — may be the best way to rid your brain of waste. It may even help reduce the chances of developing Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other neurological diseases.

A company called Aerial Assault has turned a quadcopter into a flying hacker which scans the world below for hackable devices and vulnerable Wi-Fi ports, a type of relatively harmless computer attack called penetration testing.

The all-pinot Armand de Brignac “Ace of Spades” Champagne is the brand’s most expensive and exclusive fizz yet, so when I finally sampled it last week, my first thought was: How much of the $760 price tag is for bling? Short answer: much of it.

It's the Luddite's dream — nature striking down invasive technology. (Don't worry, the  eagle is okay!)

American politicians, you’d better step up your game. This campaign ad from Canadian politician Wyatt Scott—featuring dragons, giant geese, robots, laser eyes and much, much more—is the new gold standard in campaign advertising.

Read more...

In a new study conducted by NASA and scientists from the Netherlands, it's been found that American environmental progress is being hindered by residual pollution being blown towards the American West. Oh cruel world!

by @uaiHebert

Tinder had a sad Twitter meltdown last night in response to a Vanity Fair article on Tinder users. The tech company sent a total of 30 rambling tweets into the ether.

Pearson, has sold a major share of The Economist, to the Agnelli Family of Italy, which also controls Fiat Chrysler. The remaining shares were bought by The Economist itself, which is funding the venture by selling off its headquarters.

BOSTON—Arriving suddenly overnight without any prior warning, a solitary pop-up tent was reportedly seen standing forebodingly at the corner of Endicott and Thacher Streets this morning, its bleak 10’-by-10’ form and the single folding table set up beneath it serving as a dark harbinger of a street festival to come. Bystanders, chilled to the marrow by an array of extension cords snaking across the sidewalk, also reported catching sight of what looked like a small stage being erected between a pair of speakers and confirmed the presence of white plastic chairs stacked in numerous terrifying columns nearby. Aghast sources further claimed to have witnessed a most wretched man briskly moving around the area in a T-shirt emblazoned with the dismaying word “Volunteer,” a telltale sign that roiling hordes of thousands, sweat-covered and beer-craving, would soon appear. At press time, the eerie, ear-splitting screech of a metal fence being ...

Orcs are notable here as they are listed as the actual “full” orcs, rather than the half-orc that other games have. There’s a little sidebar here that talks about this choice, stating the case that a race isn’t automatically evil.
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cadet-r-kelly:

someone waited their entire life to publish that

"There's one thing that I have in common with every person in this room. We're all trying really hard to figure out how to save the world."

The speaker, Cat Lavigne, paused for a second, and then she repeated herself. "We're trying to change the world!"

Lavigne was addressing attendees of the Effective Altruism Global conference, which she helped organize at Google's Quad Campus in Mountain View the weekend of July 31 to August 2. Effective altruists think that past attempts to do good — by giving to charity, or working for nonprofits or government agencies — have been largely ineffective, in part because they've been driven too much by the desire to feel good and too little by the cold, hard data necessary to prove what actually does good.

It's a powerful idea, and one that has already saved lives. GiveWell, the charity evaluating organization to which effective altruism can trace its origins, has pushed philanthropy toward evidence and away from giving based on personal whims and sentiment. Effective altruists have also been remarkably forward-thinking on factory farming, taking the problem of animal suffering seriously without collapsing into PETA-style posturing and sanctimony.

Effective altruism (or EA, as proponents refer to it) is more than a belief, though. It's a movement, and like any movement, it has begun to develop a culture, and a set of powerful stakeholders, and a certain range of worrying pathologies. At the moment, EA is very white, very male, and dominated by tech industry workers. And it is increasingly obsessed with ideas and data that reflect the class position and interests of the movement's members rather than a desire to help actual people.

In the beginning, EA was mostly about fighting global poverty. Now it's becoming more and more about funding computer science research to forestall an artificial intelligence–provoked apocalypse. At the risk of overgeneralizing, the computer science majors have convinced each other that the best way to save the world is to do computer science research. Compared to that, multiple attendees said, global poverty is a "rounding error."

I identify as an effective altruist: I think it's important to do good with your life, and doing as much good as possible is a noble goal. I even think AI risk is a real challenge worth addressing. But speaking as a white male nerd on the autism spectrum, effective altruism can't just be for white male nerds on the autism spectrum. Declaring that global poverty is a "rounding error" and everyone really ought to be doing computer science research is a great way to ensure that the movement remains dangerously homogenous and, ultimately, irrelevant.

Should we care about the world today at all?

Don Davis / NASA

EA Global was dominated by talk of existential risks, or X-risks. The idea is that human extinction is far, far worse than anything that could happen to real, living humans today.

To hear effective altruists explain it, it comes down to simple math. About 108 billion people have lived to date, but if humanity lasts another 50 million years, and current trends hold, the total number of humans who will ever live is more like 3 quadrillion. Humans living during or before 2015 would thus make up only 0.0036 percent of all humans ever.

The numbers get even bigger when you consider — as X-risk advocates are wont to do — the possibility of interstellar travel. Nick Bostrom — the Oxford philosopher who popularized the concept of existential risk — estimates that about 10^54 human life-years (or 10^52 lives of 100 years each) could be in our future if we both master travel between solar systems and figure out how to emulate human brains in computers.

Even if we give this 10^54 estimate "a mere 1% chance of being correct," Bostrom writes, "we find that the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives."

Put another way: The number of future humans who will never exist if humans go extinct is so great that reducing the risk of extinction by 0.00000000000000001 percent can be expected to save 100 billion more lives than, say, preventing the genocide of 1 billion people. That argues, in the judgment of Bostrom and others, for prioritizing efforts to prevent human extinction above other endeavors. This is what X-risk obsessives mean when they claim ending world poverty would be a "rounding error."

Why Silicon Valley is scared its own creations will destroy humanity

Anna Riedl

There are a number of potential candidates for most threatening X-risk. Personally I worry most about global pandemics, both because things like the Black Death and the Spanish flu have caused massive death before, and because globalization and the dawn of synthetic biology have made diseases both easier to spread and easier to tweak (intentionally or not) for maximum lethality. But I'm in the minority on that. The only X-risk basically anyone wanted to talk about at the conference was artificial intelligence.

The specific concern — expressed by representatives from groups like the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) in Berkeley and Bostrom's Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford — is over the possibility of an "intelligence explosion." If humans are able to create an AI as smart as humans, the theory goes, then it stands to reason that that AI would be smart enough to create itself, and to make itself even smarter. That'd set up a process of exponential growth in intelligence until we get an AI so smart that it would almost certainly be able to control the world if it wanted to. And there's no guarantee that it'd allow humans to keep existing once it got that powerful. "It looks quite difficult to design a seed AI such that its preferences, if fully implemented, would be consistent with the survival of humans and the things we care about," Bostrom told me in an interview last year.

This is not a fringe viewpoint in Silicon Valley. MIRI's top donor is the Thiel Foundation, funded by PayPal and Palantir cofounder and billionaire angel investor Peter Thiel, which has given $1.627 million to date. Jaan Tallinn, the developer of Skype and Kazaa, is both a major MIRI donor and the co-founder of two groups — the Future of Life Institute and the Center for the Study of Existential Risk — working on related issues. And earlier this year, the Future of Life Institute got $10 million from Thiel's PayPal buddy, Tesla Motors/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who grew concerned about AI risk after reading Bostrom's book Superintelligence.

And indeed, the AI risk panel — featuring Musk, Bostrom, MIRI's executive director Nate Soares, and the legendary UC Berkeley AI researcher Stuart Russell — was the most hyped event at EA Global. Musk naturally hammed it up for the crowd. At one point, Russell set about rebutting AI researcher Andrew Ng's comment that worrying about AI risk is like "worrying about overpopulation on Mars," countering, "Imagine if the world's governments and universities and corporations were spending billions on a plan to populate Mars." Musk looked up bashfully, put his hand on his chin, and smirked, as if to ask, "Who says I'm not?"

Russell's contribution was the most useful, as it confirmed this really is a problem that serious people in the field worry about. The analogy he used was with nuclear research. Just as nuclear scientists developed norms of ethics and best practices that have so far helped ensure that no bombs have been used in attacks for 70 years, AI researchers, he urged, should embrace a similar ethic, and not just make cool things for the sake of making cool things.

What if the AI danger argument is too clever by half?

Shutterstock

What was most concerning was the vehemence with which AI worriers asserted the cause's priority over other cause areas. For one thing, we have such profound uncertainty about AI — whether general intelligence is even possible, whether intelligence is really all a computer needs to take over society, whether artificial intelligence will have an independent will and agency the way humans do or whether it'll just remain a tool, what it would mean to develop a "friendly" versus "malevolent" AI — that it's hard to think of ways to tackle this problem today other than doing more AI research, which itself might increase the likelihood of the very apocalypse this camp frets over.

The common response I got to this was, "Yes, sure, but even if there's a very, very, very small likelihood of us decreasing AI risk, that still trumps global poverty, because infinitesimally increasing the odds that 10^52 people in the future exist saves way more lives than poverty reduction ever could."

The problem is that you could use this logic to defend just about anything. Imagine that a wizard showed up and said, "Humans are about to go extinct unless you give me $10 to cast a magical spell." Even if you only think there's a, say, 0.00000000000000001 percent chance that he's right, you should still, under this reasoning, give him the $10, because the expected value is that you're saving 10^32 lives.

Bostrom calls this scenario "Pascal's Mugging," and it's a huge problem for anyone trying to defend efforts to reduce human risk of extinction to the exclusion of anything else. These arguments give a false sense of statistical precision by slapping probability values on beliefs. But those probability values are literally just made up. Maybe giving $1,000 to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute will reduce the probability of AI killing us all by 0.00000000000000001. Or maybe it'll make it only cut the odds by 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001. If the latter's true, it's not a smart donation; if you multiply the odds by 10^52, you've saved an expected 0.0000000000001 lives, which is pretty miserable. But if the former's true, it's a brilliant donation, and you've saved an expected 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 lives.

I don't have any faith that we understand these risks with enough precision to tell if an AI risk charity can cut our odds of doom by 0.00000000000000001 or by only 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001. And yet for the argument to work, you need to be able to make those kinds of distinctions.

The other problem is that the AI crowd seems to be assuming that people who might exist in the future should be counted equally to people who definitely exist today. That's by no means an obvious position, and tons of philosophers dispute it. Among other things, it implies what's known as the Repugnant Conclusion: the idea that the world should keep increasing its population until the absolutely maximum number of humans are alive, living lives that are just barely worth living. But if you say that people who only might exist count less than people who really do or really will exist, you avoid that conclusion, and the case for caring only about the far future becomes considerably weaker (though still reasonably compelling).

Doing good through aggressive self-promotion

Dylan Matthews

To be fair, the AI folks weren't the only game in town. Another group emphasized "meta-charity," or giving to and working for effective altruist groups. The idea is that more good can be done if effective altruists try to expand the movement and get more people on board than if they focus on first-order projects like fighting poverty.

This is obviously true to an extent. There's a reason that charities buy ads. But ultimately you have to stop being meta. As Jeff Kaufman — a developer in Cambridge who's famous among effective altruists for, along with his wife Julia Wise, donating half their household's income to effective charities — argued in a talk about why global poverty should be a major focus, if you take meta-charity too far, you get a movement that's really good at expanding itself but not necessarily good at actually helping people.

And you have to do meta-charity well — and the more EA grows obsessed with AI, the harder it is to do that. The movement has a very real demographic problem, which contributes to very real intellectual blinders of the kind that give rise to the AI obsession. And it's hard to imagine that yoking EA to one of the whitest and most male fields (tech) and academic subjects (computer science) will do much to bring more people from diverse backgrounds into the fold.

The self-congratulatory tone of the event didn't help matters either. I physically recoiled during the introductory session when Kerry Vaughan, one of the event's organizers, declared, "I really do believe that effective altruism could be the last social movement we ever need." In the annals of sentences that could only be said with a straight face by white men, that one might take the cake.

Effective altruism is a useful framework for thinking through how to do good through one's career, or through political advocacy, or through charitable giving. It is not a replacement for movements through which marginalized peoples seek their own liberation. If EA is to have any hope of getting more buy-in from women and people of color, it has to at least acknowledge that.

There's hope

Anna Riedl

I don't mean to be unduly negative. EA Global was also full of people doing innovative projects that really do help people — and not just in global poverty either. Nick Cooney, the director of education for Mercy for Animals, argued convincingly that corporate campaigns for better treatment of farm animals could be an effective intervention. One conducted by the Humane League pushed food services companies — the firms that supply cafeterias, food courts, and the like — to commit to never using eggs from chickens confined to brutal battery cages. That resulted in corporate pledges sparing 5 million animals a year, and when the cost of the campaign was tallied up, it cost less than 2 cents per animal in the first year alone.

Another push got Walmart and Starbucks to not use pigs from farms that deploy "gestation crates" which make it impossible for pregnant pigs to turn around or take more than a couple of steps. That cost about 5 cents for each of the 18 million animals spared. The Humane Society of the United States' campaigns for state laws that restrict battery cages, gestation crates, and other inhumane practices spared 40 million animals at a cost of 40 cents each.

This is exactly the sort of thing effective altruists should be looking at. Cooney was speaking our language: heavy on quantitative measurement, with an emphasis on effectiveness and a minimum of emotional appeals. He even identified as "not an animal person." "I never had pets growing up, and I have no interest in getting them today," he emphasized. But he was also helping make the case that EA principles can work in areas outside of global poverty. He was growing the movement the way it ought to be grown, in a way that can attract activists with different core principles rather than alienating them.

If effective altruism does a lot more of that, it can transform philanthropy and provide a revolutionary model for rigorous, empirically minded advocacy. But if it gets too impressed with its own cleverness, the future is far bleaker.

Correction: This article originally stated that the Machine Intelligence Research Institute is in Oakland; it's in Berkeley.

felixcolgrave:

corvus dentata

You’ve basically read this anti-trigger warning article before. You probably didn’t even see the far-less-popular follow-up, “I was a liberal adjunct professor. My liberal students didn’t scare me at all.” The stories people share about trigger warnings tend to wildly misunderstand the issue; this latest one literally depicts modern college students as babies.

The Atlantic‘s piece makes some reference to work done by mental health professionals and the idea that perhaps trigger warnings don’t much help people who have PTSD, which is an argument I’ve heard before. However, the piece uses the idea of “exposure therapy” as a justification for why trigger warnings can harm students:

Students with PTSD should of course get treatment, but they should not try to avoid normal life … A discussion of violence is unlikely to be followed by actual violence, so it is a good way to help students change the associations that are causing them discomfort. And they’d better get their habituation done in college, because the world beyond college will be far less willing to accommodate requests for trigger warnings and opt-outs.

This assertion that classroom discussions are a “good way to help students” lacks a citation. Although “exposure therapy” worked for me, personally, that’s probably because a mental health professional was involved.

This article does very little to explore how educators might better serve PTSD sufferers; instead, the piece seems to assert that educators shouldn’t have to change a thing. Also, the title, photo, and overall framing of the piece emphasizes the myth of the oversensitive, trophy-hoarding millennial who just wants to get out of doing their homework. This assumption supposes that young college students are using their “fragile” natures as an excuse to not engage with “words and ideas they don’t like” (e.g. “students seem to be reporting more emotional crises; many seem fragile”).

And as for the words they “don’t like”? Let’s see:

The recent collegiate trend of uncovering allegedly racist, sexist, classist, or otherwise discriminatory microaggressions doesn’t incidentally teach students to focus on small or accidental slights. Its purpose is to get students to focus on them and then relabel the people who have made such remarks as aggressors.

Speaking as a millennial who got trophies for nothing (and I could tell I hadn’t “earned” them, by the way — we all could tell, and so we internalized worthlessness, not “specialness”), worked an unpaid internship for years in addition to being a full-time student and also working a paying part-time job, and had an abusive relationship that resulted in mild PTSD and anxiety, I guess you could say I’m an expert on bad millennial stereotypes. And this article is far from the first one I’ve seen to lean on these tropes. This is just one in a long line of misunderstandings on the part of older college professors who actually just seem angry at the “political correctness” their modern students have begun to demand. They may try to characterize us as literal babies, but they’re the ones who look like babies to me, given the refusal to acknowledge their students’ experiences. They can’t be bothered to make small changes to their own curriculums that might better facilitate conversations among their students about media depictions of violence, rape, assault, war, kidnapping, and so on.

I like the idea of trigger warnings, but I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not sure they do much to protect people from panic attacks. Unfortunately, almost no articles that discuss trigger warnings seem particularly interested in centering the experiences of people with anxiety and PTSD, and how those people might be better served by institutions and classes that they’re paying thousands and thousands of dollars to attend. Ahem. Anyway.

A trigger warning doesn’t necessarily stop me from engaging with content, but it does help me prepare for what I might endure. In my experience, though, it’s almost impossible for me to predict what will trigger a panic attack in me. That doesn’t mean I think trigger warnings are useless; I understand the purpose they’re meant to serve, even though they don’t always work. I think trigger warnings have arisen in response to the uncontrolled, fire-hose nature of the internet; young people use them as a way to cope with how little control we have over the way content has changed in the age of modern technology.

I don’t have evidence to back up my claims about how these warnings work, unfortunately, but I do have a lot of anecdotal stories from friends about how they have trouble predicting what will “set off” their anxiety, as well. What’s more, the treatment of anxiety and PTSD focuses on allowing people who suffer from these conditions to continue to enjoy and interact with media in spite of triggers. If your therapist tells you to just stop watching TV entirely, uh, get a new therapist because the best ones I’ve had have been the ones who’ve encouraged me to gain the tools to navigate even the hardest aspects of my daily life. The end goal of treatment, in my experience, is to be able to continue interacting with potential triggers without having a panic attack.

I don’t actually think these articles tend to be about PTSD sufferers at all, though. I think they are about silencing discussions of how media tends to depict violence and rape, and refusing to acknowledge how and why modern students are “offended” by many of these depictions. To me, the entire point of a good arts studies course would be to discuss how these representations tend to be framed, and to highlight whether or not those depictions are exploitative, or even sexist, racist, and transphobic. Millennials are not afraid of these conversations. Quite the opposite, in my experience. The reason why trigger warnings and content warnings have become a mainstay in progressive blogging spaces is because young people have finally begun to acknowledge how many of us have dealt with trauma and violence, and have craved places to discuss how our stories get depicted in media.

I’ll end this piece by highlighting an example of a college professor I had who did this right. Long before I knew about feminism or trigger warnings at all, I read the novel McTeague for a college course. In the run-up to the book, our professor told us that it would feature some implied sexual violence. In other words, she told us we might be a bit creeped out. She was right; it’s a pretty gross book. But we were prepared well ahead of time, and we came to class ready to discuss how the book navigated these topics.

If I had gone to my professor with a doctor’s note and explained that I couldn’t read the book, I’m not sure what would have happened. I’d like to think she wouldn’t have been a jerk about it, and that my condition would have been respected as much as any other time that I got sick over the course of my academic career. PTSD and anxiety are real, and they can be treated, and the end goal of treatment is … yup … allowing a student to go back to doing their homework. But, again, I don’t think that’s what this article was ever really about.

I wish that articles about trigger warnings would stop throwing anxiety and PTSD sufferers under the bus as a veiled excuse to mock students’ political correctness. If professors think trigger warnings are for “fragile” babies, then I’d hate to see how they navigate topics like sexism and racism in their classrooms. You’d think they’d want to be sure they were discussing these difficult topics in a way that didn’t alienate their most marginalized students. Even students who don’t suffer from anxiety or PTSD could benefit from a more respectful approach to tough topics, especially given how many students have had to navigate oppressive systems for their entire lives.

The fact that millennials have begun to call out institutions for their backwards ways makes me feel proud. Any attempt to frame these young students as afraid, oversensitive, and irresponsible should be seen for what it is: old institutions unwilling to accommodate the diverse experiences of their students.

(via The Atlantic, image via screenshot)

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