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TuviaDulin comments on No, Really, I've Deceived Myself - Less Wrong
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I've thought about this as well. Its basically the same question as "If I had the option of living in a virtual reality fantasy world without ever knowing that the real world existed, and I would be happier in the VR world, would I rather live there?" Is increased happiness worth the cost of self-deception?
I've tried to do what you describe. It didn't work, and it made me feel cheap, like I wasn't respecting myself. That's just my own subjective experience of course.
That's my subjective experience as well. But clearly other people don't operate the same way, to the same extent.
I compare it to the recent empirical work on morality, where they have found a number of different moral modalities by which people determine something good or bad, and further found that people weight those modalities differently. Fairness might have the greatest weight to you, while autonomy might have the greatest to me.
I think a similar thing happens with ideas. They get accepted according to a multimodal valuation. Only one of those modes is predictive power, but that's the mode predominant in rationalist circles, and rationalists get together and wonder how other people can believe tripe. Well, because the tripe fulfills some other valuation that we don't feel as strongly. Maybe that value is believing what powerful people tell you. Maybe that value is believing what your neighbors believe. Maybe that value is believing what your elders believe. Maybe it's not believing what your elders believe.