Jeff Bell's Six Trapdoors of OCD/Anxiety

From Jeff Bell's outstanding OCD book, When in Doubt Make Belief, six trap-doors on the false path to escaping doubt. I've fallen through all of them, one time or another, except for #5, fixing.

1. Checking: physically searching for verification that some feared consequences did not, or will not, happen.

2. Reassurance-seeking: asking for the assurances of others that some feared consequences did not, or will not happen.

3. Ruminating: mentally replaying events, conversations, and other sequences in search of verification that some feared consequence did not, or will not, happen.

4. Protecting: performing rituals (such as repeating patterns) and acting in unproductive ways for the sole purpose of warding off feared consequences.

5. Fixing: performing rituals (often relating to symmetry) for the sole purpose of making things "feel" right

6. Avoiding: deliberately avoiding events that trigger anxiety; this can be thought of as the ultimate compulsion.

Favorite Science Writers: William Poundstone

Here are two of my faves by William Poundstone that I read years ago. Both are first-rate.

Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge

We conceive of and describe the world in ways that usually work just fine, but in the far corners of the labyrinth of reason, our best intentions fold back on themselves, and we end up trapped in an intractable loop or tumbling down a chute of infinite regress. Labyrinths of Reason is a collection of classic philosophical thought experiments and other imponderables that push reason and language to their logical limits. Beyond just idle brainteasers, William Poundstone shows that these mental exercises have profound implications for such fields as cryptography, decision theory, subatomic physics, and computer programming. But most of all, they're good, clean philosophical fun.

Prisoner's Dilemma

When it flourished in the 1950s, game theory, the construct of Hungarian-born mathematician John von Neumann (1903-1957), was the dominant metaphor for nuclear war debates. Game theorists today operate on more modest economic and organizational models but this reevaluation of game theory's development is nevertheless interesting. Poundstone's three-dimensional outline of the mathematics of game theory sketches von Neumann's life and offers game theory scenarios of Cold War history. The "prisoner's dilemma" is the classic model of conflict situations in which strategies leading to either individual gain or the common good are examined. Featuring much of the think tank/parlor game quality that makes game theory so seductive, Poundstone wisely restricts his discussion of von Neumann to that which serves his theme. The West's Cold War policy was formed around the structure of game theory at the RAND Corporation and other think tanks; Poundstone makes essential connections among the theory, von Newmann's politics and historical forces.