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Aurini comments on Would Your Real Preferences Please Stand Up? - Less Wrong
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I agree with your point here -- strongly. But I also think you're being unfair to Caplan. While his position is (I now realize) ridiculous, the example you gave is not.
His position would not be that they like doing those behaviors per se, but rather, they have a very strange preference that makes those behaviors seem optimal. Caplan would probably call it "a preference for an unusually high level of certainty about something". For example, someone with OCD needs to perceive 1 million:1 odds that they're hands are now clean, while normal people need only 100:1 odds.
So the preference is for cleanliness-certainty, not the act of hand-washing. To get that higher level of certainty requires that they wash their hands much more often.
Likewise, an OCD victim who has to lock their door 10 times before leaving has an unusually high preference for "certainty that the door is locked", not for locking doors.
Again, I don't agree with this position, but it's handling of OCD isn't that stupid.
I used to have a mild case of OCD.
Let's say I cracked my first knuckle. Well, of course I'm going to crack the other three to balance things out. But then I mess up - my ring finger is only 70% cracked. I can feel it in the joint, a sort of localized anxiety (sort of like an itch, or a joint that needs stretching, but it's a purely psychological irritation). Obviously I can't 30% crack my knuckle - that's no different than moving the finger. So I have to over crack it, up to 130%, and then follow up with the other three fingers.
But now I"ve hit a problem - I've cracked each finger twice, that's not a good number. Things feel worse than they did before the crack. I'd better square things out, so that each finger has been cracked four times - that's a good number. But now my right hand is bothering me, so to even it out I crack each finger there four times. And... oh, what the hell. We'll crack each finger sixteen times. That's 2^8 * 2^4 - gorgeous. I mean, just look at that notation! How much prettier could you want it to be?
Everything's fine until next time I need to crack something... shudder
I eventually forced myself to stop doing this during my last years of High School. It was ridiculous, and I knew it, but each time I encountered it I'd have that itch. But I forced myself to ignore it, the same way you can't scratch your nose while you're on stage, and eventually I broke the habit. But even thinking about it now makes me want to do something that's exponentially symmetrical...
NO! NO, I WON'T GIVE INTO YOU OCD!
;)