Let me introduce a conjecture that I will call the Strong Biological Placebo Effect. The Strong Biological Placebo Effect states: if you believe a course of action can improve your health, then the mere belief invariably triggers biological changes that improve your health.
If the Strong Biological Placebo Effect is true, then it creates a situation where superrationality applies to human beings. You can consistently, and rationally, choose to believe that setting your alarm clock to prime numbers will increase your health; alternatively, you can consistently, and rationally, choose to believe that setting your alarm clock to prime numbers will not increase your health. If you are superrational, you will choose the latter option, and you will be healthier because of the superrationality.
(Caveat: the Strong Biological Placebo Effect is probably not even remotely true, so don't whip out your magnetic bracelets quite yet.)
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Can you believe that ignoring the placebo effect improves your health and then ignore the placebo effect in order to get a health benefit?
This really begs the question of what one means by "belief". For humans, belief is, to a large extent the mapping of internal "model" onto external evidence, but is also largely a set of emotional states. It can be logically decomposed into these two things. One can choose the latter in order to derive some benefit. The other, that is, the mapping of models onto data, is not so flexible, as when the models are changed in a data-independent manner they are no longer, in some important senses, "beliefs". Since it's not possible to seek out evidence that confirms or disconfirms a belief (conservation of expected evidence), our options are more limited.
One way of thinking about this is that to a human it is possible to 'decide' that one's belief in proposition x with p = 27% = belief or that it equals disbelief because we have a separate and arbitrary "belief" marker attached to a proposition as well as a probability. (these markers can also be attached to non-propositions like Christianity)
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