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While you can't fool your logical brain, if you want to have a false belief to make you happy, you don't need to anyway. The brain is compartmentalized and often doesn't update what you feel intuitively true, or what you base your actions on, just because you learned a fact. This sentence: "You can't know the consequences of being biased, until you have already debiased yourself" strikes me as most hard to believe. Reading about a bias and considering its consequences, esp. in an academic mindframe does NOT debias you. That requires applying it to your life and reasoning, recognizing when you are biased, sometimes even training and conditioning to change how you think. If after learning about a bias, I rationally decided that I want to keep it, I would just shelve it in my memory as academic trivia irrelevant to daily life, and I would stay just as biased as before in regards to what I do and how I feel.
In response to
Mundane Magic
Awesome post, but somebody should do the pessimist version, rewriting various normal facets of the human condition as horrifying angsty undead curses.
The Curse of Downregulation: Sufferers of this can never live "happily ever after", for anything that gives them joy, done often enough, will become mundane and boring. Someone who is afflicted could have the great luck to earn a million a day, and after a year they will be filled with despair and envy at their neighbor who is making two million, no happier than they would be in poverty.
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I will help a suffering thing if it benefits me to help it, or if the social contract requires me to. Otherwise I will walk away.
I adopted this cruel position after going through one long relationship where I constantly demanded emotional "help" from the girl, then another relationship soon afterwards where the girl constantly demanded similar "help" from me. Both those situations felt so sick that I finally understood: participating in any guilt-trip scenario makes you a worse person, no matter whether you're tripping or being tripped. And it also makes the world worse off: being openly vulnerable to guilt-tripping encourages more guilt-tripping all around.
So relax and follow your own utility - this will incentivize others to incentivize you to help them, so everyone will treat you well, and you'll treat them well in advance for the same reason.
People who require help can be divided into those who are capable of helping themselves, and those who are not. Such a position as yours would express the value preference that sacrificing the good of the latter group is better than letting the first group get unpaid rewards - in all cases. For me it's not that simple, the choice depends on the proportion of the groups, cost to me and society, and just how much good is being sacrificed. To make an extreme example, I would save someone's life even if this encourages other people to be less careful protecting theirs.