You focus on pleasant misbeliefs, rather than what (in my opinion) is much more common, distressing misbeliefs.

For instance, you write, "Some misbeliefs about the universe at large may also yield benefits to individual believers or to society. A prime candidate, of course, is religion," begging the question that it's belief in God--a belief held to by virtually all humans ever--that's the comforting/evolved misbelief, and that atheism is the correct view; that all those many billions of humans who experience transcendence and have faith are the ones who are deluded, and that the tiny minority of atheists are the only ones seeing things clearly. And that could be the case--because the vast majority of people believe something, that doesn't make it true. But it doesn't make it false, either, and if everyone except me thinks something is true, then the burden of proof is kind of on me, not them. Why does the more cynical, but equally nonfalsifiable, belief that there is no God get the benefit of the doubt?

I think this is tied to something you've written about before, for instance in "Seven Laws of Declinism." In that essay, you summarize reasons why bad news has more salience than good news. But what happens when you try to disabuse someone of their negative false beliefs? Person: "There are more cancer deaths now than ever!" Me: "Well, insofar as way more people live long enough to get cancer, maybe...but age-standardized cancer rates are so much lower now than they were in the past, and plus we're so much better at curing and preventing a lot of different cancers, so, overall, no, we're doing pretty great on the cancer front." How does that person respond--"yay, awesome, I'm glad I was wrong about cancer" or "that can't be true, what about [reason]/[anecdote]"? Given what you write about, I suspect your experience with this scenario is the same as mine, and you know that people are, uh, not happy to learn that the world is better off than they thought.

People don't delude themselves into accepting comforting beliefs; they delude themselves into thinking the world is worse than it is.

I'm sure I'm not an exception to this, and I believe a lot of horrible things to be true that are false. So yeah, feed me the red pill. I'll likely believe way more comforting things, and be more sanguine about the disquieting ones.