Unless you have OCD yourself, I’m not sure your opinion on that counts. You should probably ask Yvain… who appears to indeed be controlling certainty, not being compelled to engage in specific behaviors.
Okay, fair point. Still, you gotta give me props for noticing the right hypothesis[1] based on such little data—that’s half the battle, remember! -- even if I did subsequently reject it because OCDers are so predictably bad at identifying the regularity behind their compulsions.
Arguably, I have a low-grade form of OCD myself. I always have to check the back end of my car when I park it in my garage to make sure the garage door won’t close on it, even though I’ve used the same garage and roughly similar cars for the last four years, and have a wooden block to mark when it’s in far enough.
But unlike cargo cult OCDers, I don’t find some kind of magic number that satisfies me. Sometimes I just say “to hell with it” and don’t check. Sometimes I go back twice to check. Usually, just once. But I always recognize that I’m doing it to make sure my car is in far enough, and so I can identify ways of making myself not “have to” check, if I ever thought it was worth the effort, or found my ritual too bizarre. I can put a mirror or camera in, for example.
In fact, the reason I never considered my habit OCD until now was because it isn’t accompanied by a hard-headed focus on a specific act, as opposed to a specific level of certainty.
Unless you have OCD yourself, I’m not sure your opinion on that counts. You should probably ask Yvain… who appears to indeed be controlling certainty, not being compelled to engage in specific behaviors.
Or of course, you could always consult some of the research...
Okay, fair point. Still, you gotta give me props for noticing the right hypothesis[1] based on such little data—that’s half the battle, remember! -- even if I did subsequently reject it because OCDers are so predictably bad at identifying the regularity behind their compulsions.
Arguably, I have a low-grade form of OCD myself. I always have to check the back end of my car when I park it in my garage to make sure the garage door won’t close on it, even though I’ve used the same garage and roughly similar cars for the last four years, and have a wooden block to mark when it’s in far enough.
But unlike cargo cult OCDers, I don’t find some kind of magic number that satisfies me. Sometimes I just say “to hell with it” and don’t check. Sometimes I go back twice to check. Usually, just once. But I always recognize that I’m doing it to make sure my car is in far enough, and so I can identify ways of making myself not “have to” check, if I ever thought it was worth the effort, or found my ritual too bizarre. I can put a mirror or camera in, for example.
In fact, the reason I never considered my habit OCD until now was because it isn’t accompanied by a hard-headed focus on a specific act, as opposed to a specific level of certainty.
[1] in a devil’s advocate defense of Caplan