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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist - Less Wrong
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Certainty in the rational conclusion is how I overcame a number of irrational fears. The fear has actually gone away with practice. But generally, the point is valid, as there are just preprogrammed things to which your organism reacts, and this is not necessarily a statement about you. In other cases, you probably should follow the urge, if the context itself is valuable to you. For example, it might be inhumane to not flinch from the sight of dead bodies, even if you know that they are just a very realistic illusion produced by a computer program.
Yes - the challenge and benefit of reaching certainty in the rational conclusion here, is something that really deserves emphasis. I remember, way back when, having to put some work into that - having to visualize the bottom line and the degree of correlation across worlds, just to convince myself that standing in front of a closed door and visualizing in detail a knife-wielding maniac on the other side, did not in the slightest affect my correlation across possible worlds with the number of actual knife-wielding maniacs.
You've just got to make the transition to really really knowing that is true.