I didn't offer any particular advice there, only suggested his fears may be rational; but it's an important caveat that merely because a belief is rational doesn't make that belief correct, which I suppose I should have been more clear about.

It sounds to me like the real basis of his concern may be the fact that he's making unreciprocated requests. I have no in-depth knowledge of the situation, so I'm merely hazarding a guess here, but if he's the one arranging all the dates (or whatever), an alleviation of his fears would require her to take a more active role in the relationship. Which may require having a serious discussion admitting his anxieties and the reasons for them. An arrangement where she has to plan every other date, or whatever, might suffice.

I've found a CBT* technique useful for overcoming that sort of anxiety (it's called catastrophising). I write down the situation and my prediction in a spreadsheet. An example would be: Situation - at work, I emailed [girl]; she hasn't emailed back yet. Prediction - She is going to break up with me.

Then when you receive an email back, you write down the outcome in a third column, e.g. received email back - we are meeting up tonight.

Looking back over the spreadsheet, you can see how accurate your predictions have been. I expect they tend to be too negative.

*CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) has a strong evidence base.

ETA: I hope that explanation is clear - I'm in a bit of a rush right now! I really wanted to explain it though, as it's had an extremely positive impact on my anxiety levels.

Have you dated before?

It sounds like these contact points are natural accumulation points for your anxiety - not so much that you're specially anxious about them.

That said, what sorts of things are you requesting? I'd recommend a shift to make suggestions, or invitations where a 'no' answer can very clearly (even to you) be accompanied by 'It's sweet of you to offer, though' rather than 'GTFO'. If requesting something comes up so often that you've noticed the pattern, and they cause an aversion, perhaps you should avoid making so many requests per se?

So I think a variant of this approach is useful and a variant of this approach is really harmful. If you say "fuck it, she's not important," you'll be conditioning yourself not to care about her or even actively resent her for "making" you anxious. That way lies a lot of badness.

Nevertheless, I do think it's handy to come to terms with the idea that if she decides to break up with you, then it's not the worst thing in the world. It's an admittedly sucky but manageable state of affairs. You will be a finite amount sadder than you were when you were single! And although you have some influence on her decisions, you have no control over them. So think "I have done everything in my control in this situation. Now I will go play video games/exercise/whatever." This is a more detailed, more accurate, healthier variant of "fuck it, she's just a girl."

Fantastic girls are important! But they're not your whole life! But they are also not unimportant! There's a large range in between those two!

Not an advice, just wanted to mention that if you are so worried offline, so to speak, some of it is bound to eventually leak through into the together time, and few people like it when the other person comes across as desperate or clingy. Also note that in most cases people get dumped in person, or sometimes over the phone, not by email/text/facebook status update, so the most dangerous time is probably the first few minutes after you meet up. Hope none of that happens to you.

Do you want advice about whether or not your concerns are rational, or advice on how to overcome these concerns?

And by evidence-based advice, do you want studies? Because I think the specific case may be, well, too specific for evidence-based advice to be useful. Unless your anxiety is more generalized, at least.

The point is that 'given (output X)=a' may eventually let you prove a contradiction when the output is not, in fact, a, and you have added a false statement as input.

In practice, one does not use a two-way axiom of (output X)=a but an one-way substitution rule 'replace (output X) with a' . The rule may be applied once at start, or through first N steps of deduction process (to catch the cases where deduction manages to deduce X from a slightly modified X that was included inside the 'other algorithm' ; note that one can't do it forever because at some point the proof checker arrives at X from first principles, and the contradiction can be introduced by substitution.

The issue he described is specific to using (outputs X)=a as given, which allows you to e.g. do some algebra, arrive at a number a for any reason, and then replace a with (output X) , which lets you contradict yourself, or make a self fulfilling prophesy. The intent of making it a given, is to make the substitutions one way, but the theorem prover can do substitutions other way around.

Your self-fulfilling prophecy example works for the iteration of the for loop (described in "For each xi, assume the output of X is xi, and try to deduce the expected value of U.") in which the output is assumed to be a, but for the iteration in which the output is assumed to be b, proving that the output is a would be to prove a contradiction. "if (output X)=b then U=0" is one possible outcome, but U could also equal anything else.

I don't see how the NDT algorithm as given allows "(output X)=a" to be proved outside of the for loop at all. I would think it would take (output X)=whatever for each iteration through the for loop as a given before trying to prove anything, in which case in the run of the for loop in which (output X)=b is the given, proving (output X)=a is a clear contradiction, one which I would think our prover could avoid unless our axiomatic system is contradictory in the first place.

Or to rephrase, I don't think "For each xi, assume the output of X is xi, and try to deduce the expected value of U." and "(That is, try and deduce statements of the form "if (output X)=xi then U=ui" for some ui)." are actually equivalent at all, and I think the self-fulfilling prophecy example follows the second and ignores the first.

I am JUST leaving this morning, and I have been staying at the house just a few houses down from you. I will never catch a break!

I think that ''evolved faulty thinking processes'' is the wrong way to look at it and I will argue that some biases are the consequence of structural properties of the brain, which 'cannot' be affected by evolution.

The structure can be affected by evolution, it's just too hard (takes too many coordinated mutations) to get to a structure that actually works better. I think you recognize this by your use of scare quotes, but you would be better off stating it explicitly. This is the flip side of the arguments I think you're alluding to, that the faulty thinking was actually beneficial in the EEA.

There must be an evolutionary explanation for the properties of the brain, but that doesn't mean we need to actually figure out that evolutionary explanation to understand the current behavior. Just like there must be an explanation in terms of physics, but trying to analyze every particle will clearly get us nowhere.

In fact, if you can find an explanation of a phenomenon in terms of current brain structure, I think that screens off evolutionary explanations as mere history (as long as you've really verified that the structure exists and explains the phenomenon).

I do think we're getting sidetracked by your halo effect example, though -- it might be useful to give three or four examples to avoid this (although if each one has a different explanation, that might substantially increase the effort of presenting your idea).