Are you suggesting a strategy different from "default to acting nice to people"?

Oops, sorry! I am suggesting the strategy "continue meeting strangers and being nice to them" for the problem of finding nice people. As opposed to "after meeting 5 jerks in a row, conclude that everyone is a jerk and hide from humans forever."

You can justify this strategy without phrasing it in terms of acting as if you have a belief you don't have.

Exactly! And I think I phrased it more or less this way when I computed it for personal use. But I keep encountering people who try to argue that there's no point of meeting the next person because the past 5 people they've talked to turned out to be jerks. And I think arguing with those people turned my argument into "Well you shouldn't BELIEVE the next person is going to be a jerk because that's probably skewing your data." Which isn't quite what I meant; it just got stuck in my head in that flawed form. I wasn't trying to get them to believe their data away; I was trying to get them to act nice in spite of it. =P

Does acting like you believe God exists cause you to do certain good things that you wouldn't do otherwise?

Yeah, I was trying to sorta-direct the comment at the person mentioned in the body of the post who is probably long gone by now. I was wondering if there was a "useful action" component in their desire to keep a God node around in their head that they consciously keep from melting away.