Epistemic status: open question
How does truth interact in finding happiness?
Are the ancient philosophers ways of finding peace based on deception? What do rationalists have to say about this? Are morals and rules that don't entirely apply through all situations wrong?
I will be openly thinking about this here.
Eliezer Yudkowsky on acceptance:
But this is not how decision theory works—the “rational” strategy adapts to the other players’ strategies, it does not depend on the other players being rational. If a rational agent believes the other players are irrational then it takes that expectation into account in maximizing expected utility. Van Vogt got this one right: his rationalist protagonists are formidable from accepting reality swiftly and adapting to it swiftly, without reluctance or attachment.
Self-handicapping (hat-tip Yvain) is when people who have been made aware of their own incompetence or probable future failure, deliberately impose handicaps on themselves—on the standard model, in order to give themselves an excuse for failure. To make sure they had an excuse, subjects reduced preparation times for athletic events, studied less, exerted less effort, gave opponents an advantage, lowered their own expectations, even took a drug they had been told was performance-inhibiting...
So you can see how much people value having an excuse—how much they’ll pay to make sure they have something outside themselves to blame, in case of failure. And this is a need which many belief systems fill—they provide an excuse.
In the same sense, I would suggest that a baby with your genes, born into a universe entirely fair, would by now be such a different person that as to be nowhere close to “you”, your point in Platonic person-space. You are defined by the particular unfair challenges that you face; and the test of your existence is how well you do with them.
From within that project—what good does a sense of violated entitlement do? At all? Ever? What good does it do to tell ourselves that we did everything right and deserved better, and that someone or something else is to blame? Is that the key thing we need to change, to do better next time?
Immediate adaptation to the realities of the situation! Followed by winning!
(How true and valid are these?)
Letting yourself feel your emotions makes you feel important.
Lessons should stop the emotions from generating in the first place, but if you are already feeling you shouldn't try to use the lessons to supress the emotions because you will fail and be incentivised by yourself (and by fear of being low-status and weak) to lie to yourself to say you're doing a good job of not feeling the emotion, and they will fester.