There seem to be conflicting interpretations of truth, or value - which I distinguish as either truth or utility.
The way to truth is to figure out how things are regardless of what anyone thinks or feels - zero personal agenda, attempting to eliminate all bias and mixing up your findings with the findings of others to see what they all have in common. The so-called “Objective” approach.
The way to utility is to figure out what is most valuable to yourself - like you are recommending in your post. Learn the truth of who you are in relation to the world, use your biases to your advantage and self-actualise to the max. One might call this the “Subjective” approach.
Objective truth has zero value if you are taking the subjective path to change your power for the better for you, because they are opposite and mutually exclusive in their ideal forms, methodologically speaking.
But subjective truth (truth “to you”) has zero value if you are taking the objective path to get to answers that hold up better overall than ways proposed by wishful thinkers with an agenda.
This is the difference between intellectuals like Sam Harris and self-help gurus like Jordan Peterson. You might broadly associate the objective path with cooperative behaviour and the subjective path with competitive behaviour, perhaps even with the analytic versus continental schools of philosophy respectively.
Which one holds value depends on what you’re after.
It makes sense, then, how the subjectively motivated tend towards the wishful thinking of Free Will and how it can seem true “to you” regardless of what empirical testing and logic without fallacy will lead you to, which will be Determinism.
I’ve already mentioned, perhaps on another thread - there have been a flood of active “Free Will” threads recently - that siding with Free Will is peacocking. You’re going all in or nothing, by taking absolute credit for what can most directly be attributed to you regardless of any factors that played a part, but also taking absolute blame in the same way. The bigger the ego and the higher the opinion of one’s self-worth regardless of what anyone else points out, the more extreme the attraction is to Free Will. Hard Determinism requires one to transcend ego, or at least channel it to causes as great and beyond you as possible (provided you have the mental capability to do so). You don’t need much mental capability to be more instinctual and selfish, siding with Free Will, but to go the other way you do need plenty of what is the defining factor of humans compared to other animals: the frontal cortex.
Either extreme probably makes one insufferable, with the moderates in the middle more agreeably ascribing to some degree of Compatibilism. But for one path to be “right” or at least “more right”, one first has to establish whether it’s better to be smarter or more dumb. Not actually a loaded question with an obvious answer, by the way. Obviously I side with smart, but I can understand not siding that way. Especially since not being smart rules out Determinism, and less smart people hate attention being drawn to this fact about them - instead gravitating towards other avenues that they can call a superior type of smartness: a self-defense mechanism incorporated into their attitudes and behaviours from an early age. This entrenchment combined with a lack of intellect makes it impossible for them to dislodge - and why would they want to? Of course the high risk high reward road is so attractive when you have nothing to lose, and even if you do lose, denial is easier the more dumb you are. Peacocking portrays the illusion of winning to others and yourself, even if it is covering up a loss.
Without yet calling anyone smart or dumb, it might be interesting to see what people think of this deconstruction of the debate on a meta level. From my experience there does seem to be a significant psychological component that resists rationality when it comes to establishing one’s stance with regard to Free Will et al. or refusing to. Disagreement by Free Will advocates in the usual way will be expected, but in doing so they somewhat prove my deconstruction to be right.