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wedrifid comments on The curse of identity - Less Wrong
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This is either a very obvious rationalization, or you don't understand Kaj Sotalas point, or both.
The problem Kaj Sotala described is that people have lots of goals, and important ones too, simply as a strategic feature, and they are not deeply motivated to do something about them. This means that most of us who came together here because we think the world could really be better will with all likelihood not achieve much because we're not deeply motivated to do something about the big problems. Do you really think there's no problem at hand? Then that would mean you don't really care about the big problems.
Let me rephrase.
The assumption that there would exist pure gratitude-free goals is a myth: pursuing such goals would be absurd. (people who seem do perform gratitude-free actions are often religious people: they actually believe in divine gratitude).
Therefore social gratitude is an essential component of any goal and thus it is not correlated with lack of sincere motivation, nor does it "downgrade" the goal to something less important. It's just part of it.
That doesn't follow. Degree of sincerity and degree of social gratitute may well be correlated. The fact that motivations are seldom pure doesn't change that. It just makes the relationship more grey.
I don't make a difference between seeking social gratitude and having a goal. In my view, sincere motivation is positively correlated with seeking social gratitude. You can make an analogy with markets if you want: social gratitude is money, motivation is work. If something is worth doing, it will deserve social gratitude. In my view, the author here appears to be complaining that we are working for money and not for free...