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quen_tin comments on The curse of identity - Less Wrong
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I deny that having a goal as a "strategic feature" is incompatible with being sincerly and deeply motivated. That's my point.
More precisely : either one is consciously seeking gratitude, then he/she is cynical, but I think this is rarely the case. Either seeking gratitude is only one aspect of a goal that is sincerly pursued (which means that one wants to deserve that gatiude for real). Then there is no problem, the motivation is there.
Then you don't talk about the same thing as Kaj Sotala. He talks about all the cases where it seems to you that you are deeply motivated, but the goal turns out to be, or gets turned into nothing beyond strategic self-deception. Your point may be valid, but it is about something else than what his post is about.
I don't make a difference between having a goal and seeking gratitude for that goal, it's exactly the same for me. Something is important if it deserve a lot of gratitude, something is not if it does not. That's all. The "gratitude" part is intrinsic.
If you accept my view, Kaj Sotala's statement is a nonsense: it can't turn out to be strategic self-deception when we thought we were deeply motivated, we're seeking gratitude from the start (which is precisely what "being deeply motivated" means. If at one point we discover that we've been looking for gratitude all that time, then we don't discover that we've been fooling ourself, we're only beginning to understand the true nature of any goal.
Like Wei Dai said - the core problem (at least in my case) wasn't in the prestige-seeking by itself, it was in the cached and incorrect thoughts about what would lead to prestigious results, and the fact that those cached thoughts hijacked the reasoning process. If I had stopped to really think about whether the actions made any sense, I should have realized that such actions wouldn't lead to prestige, they would lead to screwing up (in the first and second example, at least). But instead I just went with the first cliché of prestige that my brain associated with this particular task.
If I had actually thought about it, I would have realized that there were better ways of both achieving the goal and getting prestige... but because my mind was so focused on the first cliché of prestige that came up, I didn't want to think about anything that would have suggested I couldn't do it. I subconsciously believed that if I didn't get prestige this way, I wouldn't get it in any other way either, so I pushed away any doubts about it.
Maybe I misunderstood a bit your point. I understood: - "I thought I wanted to work for a great cause but it turned out I only wanted to be the kind of person who work for a great cause"
Now I understand: - "I really wanted to work for a great cause, but it turned out all my actions were directed toward giving the impression, in the short-term, that I was"
In other words, you were talking about shortsightedness when I thought it was delusion?
Yes, I think you could put it that way.