That somewhat necessitates either the group remaining very small or discussions only happening in small subsets since in any non-tiny group there will be one or more people with issues around pretty much anything.
It also wouldn't seem to work terribly well in long term and written discussions such as the ones on LW which can run for years with random members of the public joining and leaving part way through.
So the "accessory after the fact" murder example is a very clear and explicit example of where major penalties can be inflicted on pretty much anyone by providing them with particular information which forces them either into certain actions or into danger. 50%+ of the community present are going to be subject to those hazards whether or not they even understand them.
Safe space avoidance of triggers on the other hand are extremely personal, one person out of thousands can suddenly be used as a reason for why the community shouldn't talk about ,say, Rabies and since most LW communication is long term and permanent there is no such thing as "while they're not in the room". The discussion remains there when they are present even if the discussion took place while they were not.
Of course you could limit your safe spaces to verbal communication in small, personal, community events where you only talk about Rabies on the days when ,say, Jessica isn't there but then you have the situation where the main LW community could have a recurring and popular Rabies Symptoms Explained megathread.
At which point you don't so much have a "community hazard" as a polite avoidance of one topic with a few of your drinking buddies including one who isn't really part of the central community because they can't handle the discussion there but is part of your local hangout.
I hear you about difference between verbal and online communication.
The specific point I made above was regarding in-person communication. I hope I made clear that community hazards can be talked about, but carefully, in those settings, depending on the skill levels of the people involved in rational communication.
Regarding online communication, I generally see it as quite fine to talk about a potentially triggering topic on LW, as long as the article is clearly labeled as such, and people can choose not to click on it. There are exceptions where talking about a topic takes down Chesterton's fences, such as PUA, etc., but the suggestions I made above don't apply to them so much.
Information Hazards and Community Hazards
As aspiring rationalists, we generally seek to figure out the truth and hold relinquishments as a virtue, namely that whatever can be destroyed by the truth should be.
The only case where this does not apply are information hazards, defined as “a risk that arises from the dissemination or the potential dissemination of (true) information that may cause harm or enable some agent to cause harm.” For instance, if you tell me you committed a murder and make me an accessory after the fact, you have exposed me to an information hazard. In talking about information hazards, we focus on information that is harmful to the individual who receives that information.
Yet a recent conversation at my local LessWrong meetup in Columbus brought up the issue of what I would like to call community hazards, namely topics that it would be dangerous to talk about in a community setting. These are topics that are emotionally challenging and hold the risk of tearing apart the fabric of LW community groups if they are discussed.
Now, being a community hazard doesn’t mean that the topic is off-limits, especially in the context of a smaller, private LW meetup of fellow aspiring rationalists. What we decided to do is that if anyone in our LW meetup decides a topic is a community hazard, we would go meta and have a discussion about whether we should discuss the topic. We would examine whether discussing it would be emotionally challenging and how challenging it would be, whether discussing it holds the risk of taking down Chesterton’s Fences that we don’t want taken down, whether there are certain aspects of the topic that could be discussed with minimal negative consequences, or if perhaps only some members of the group would like to discuss it and then they can meet separately.
This would work differently in the context of a public rationality event, of course, of the type we do for a local secular humanist group as part of our rationality outreach work. There, we decided to use moderation strategies to head off community hazards at the pass, as the audience includes non-rationalists who may not be capable of discussing a community hazard-related topic well.
I wanted to share about this concept and these tactics in the hope that it might be helpful to other LW meetups.