I tnk it would be really useful for everyone to give as many examples of belief in belief as possible, that are concrete and not religious (religion is the example case, and is too easy).

The one I read somewhere on LW, was about someone who believes they believe they are good at chess. They're reluctant to actually play a game, because somewhere they anticipate as if they might lose, but they'll tell you they're very good.

Would people offer more examples so that this can become a really, practical tool?

Are we trying to maximize profit or utility loss?

I have a game I've been fantasizing about and I think I could make it work. It has to be a game, not a story, because I want to pull a kind of trick on the player. It's not that unusual in fiction for a character to start out on the side of the "bad guys", have a realization that his side is the one that's bad, and then go on to save the day. (James Cameron's Avatar is a recent example.) I want to start the player out on the side of bad guys that appear good, as in Eliezer's short story "The Sword of Good", and then give the player the opportunity to fail to realize that he's on the wrong side. There would be two main story branches: a default one, and one that the player can only get to by going "off-script", as it were, and not going along with what it seems like you have to do to continue the story. (At the end of the default path, the player would be shown a montage of the times he had the chance to do the right thing, but chose not to.)

The actual story would be something like the anti-Avatar; a technological civilization is encroaching on a region inhabited by magic-using, nature-spirit-worshiping nomads. The nature spirits are EVIL (think: "nature, red in tooth and claw") and resort to more and more drastic measures to try to hold back the technological civilization, in which people's lives are actually much better.

Does this sound appealing?

Robert Morris has a very unusual quality: he's never wrong. It might seem this would require you to be omniscient, but actually it's surprisingly easy. Don't say anything unless you're fairly sure of it. If you're not omniscient, you just don't end up saying much. More precisely, the trick is to pay careful attention to how you qualify what you say. ... He has an almost superhuman integrity. He's not just generally correct, but also correct about how correct he is.

--Paul Graham

So, is the main purpose of apologetics generating fictional evidence that people can find religion convincing for reasons other than social pressure?

Nonbelievers don't buy this fictional evidence, because for them the "convincing" parts aren't really convincing; but that's okay, because they are not the target audience. Fresh converts find satisfaction in knowing that although they personally joined for social reasons, there were other good reasons for joining, too. Believers are reassured that it is okay to ignore all evidence supposedly against religion, because someone else can explain it all, and that the evidence is really on the side of the religion, as confirmed by the fictional stories of conversion after facing the evidence. Doubters receive guidelines for doubting unsuccessfully, which prevent some of them from finding a way to doubt successfully.