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Normal_Anomaly comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong
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Your beliefs about the functionality of a "medicine," and the parts of your physiology that make the placebo effect work, are both part of reality. Your beliefs can, in a few (really annoying!) cases, affect their own truth or falsity, but whenever this happens there's a causal chain leading from the neural structure in your head to the part of reality in question that's every bit as valid as the causal chain in the shoelace example.
I think that if you're human, these cases are way more common than ISTM certain people realize. So in such discussions I'd always make clear if I'm talking about actual humans, about future AIs, or about idealized Cartesian agents whose cognitive algorithms cannot affect the world in any way, shape or form until they act on them.
Can I have a couple examples other than placebo affect? Preferably only one of which is in the class "confidence that something will work makes you better at it"? Partly because it's useful to ask for examples, partly because it sounds useful to know about situations like this.
Actually, pretty much all I had in mind was in the class "confidence that something will work makes you better at it" -- but looking up “Self-fulfilling prophecy” on Wikipedia reminded me of the Observer-expectancy effect (incl. the Clever Hans effect and similar). Some of Bostrom's information hazards also are relevant.