Monday, September 12, 2016

Trigger Warnings

The NY Times has give space to some student at U Chicago to protest the letter from some Dean there about not paying deference to "trigger warnings".

As this poor young thing states:

A safe space is an area on campus where students — especially but not limited to those who have endured trauma or feel marginalized — can feel comfortable talking about their experiences. This might be the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs or it could be Hillel House, but in essence, it’s a place for support and community. This spring, I was in a seminar that dealt with gender, sexuality and disability. Some of the course reading touched on disturbing subjects, including sexual violence and child abuse. The instructor told us that we could reach out to her if we had difficulty with the class materials, and that she’d do everything she could to make it easier for us to participate. She included a statement to this effect on the syllabus and repeated it briefly at the beginning of each class. Nobody sought to “retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own,” as Dean Ellison put it in the letter, nor did these measures hinder discussion or disagreement, both of which were abundant.

Now back in the late 50s and early 60s most of us who went to College went to get a job. Thus I spent time on Advanced Calculus, Thermodynamics, Organic Chemistry, Electromagnetic Theory and Applications. I even too Philosophy and Logic. I managed to go through tend years of various studies without a single trigger warning. Then I got a job!

Perhaps the issue is that if these young folks took say Accounting, Finance, Biochem, then there would be no need for such trigger warnings and they would be more terrified of making the grade. You see your opinion has zero value in analyzing a Banach Space or a Wierner Process, not that guy in New York who spells his name differently any how.

Trigger Warnings are a result perhaps of wasting your time on things that you would be better off just watching on your iPhone.