To improve, you may want to start by sketching out what an ideal interaction with a person that has a nail in their head looks like for you, and figure out how to get closer to that.
To me such an ideal interaction could be:
removing the disgust (because it has low valence)
feeling at ease with the fact that there are people in the world that have nails in their head (remembering that you, them and the nail are the natural unfolding of physics might help)
feeling joy when people (or myself) improve (the joy keeps the incentive to help them and become stronger myself)
I think the gist is removing low valence internal events and replacing them with high valence ones, while keeping the incentives to be functional.
I am not sure how much it’s possible to shift on the valence axis while retaining functionality (given the human reward circuitry) but some people do look much happier than others (be it because of genetics, meditation or other) and they usually say it makes them more productive so I’m rather optimistic.
You claim:
If you claim that (1) we do not have direct access to the world and that (2) access to the world is mediated through models then you also need to explain how (3) pragmatism allows us to test our models against the world, and you need to explain it in terms of (2) since models are the only mediator to the world.
I don’t think you give a satisfactory explanation for that, possibly a key is to precisely define what you mean by “world”. Given (1) and (2) I think that if you posit an external world it needs to be defined in terms of (2).
Note that I am not agreeing or disagreeing about the truth of 1), 2) and 3), just pointing out a contradiction or a missing explanation.
My stab at defining “world”:
a) we make observations
b) we create mathematical models of those observations
c) what we call “world” is actually a logical object defined by the widest possible application of all our mathematical models
In this view we only need to make sure that our models match our observations so the correspondence theory of truth is fine, however the “territory” or world turns out to be a super-model which I think is a significant departure from the usual map-territory distinction.