I agree with the main point here: a potent external source of motivation is an important rationality attractor. This is one of my greatest failings as a rationalist--on most issues I just don't care. (I have a hard time with empathy in general, and I find it really difficult to care about people I can't see.)
Extremely petty nitpick: I don't like the term "something to protect." For whatever reason, the phrase evokes a mental image of rationalization, and when I hear it I always think of someone trying to protect a particular belief from rationality's gaze. Whenever I see a reference to this post, I have to remind myself that "something to protect" means a noble cause that you need rationality for, not an irrational belief.
"Something to protect" as a phrase, along with the Sequences' construction of heroic effort more generally, made quite a bit more sense to me after I played Fate/stay night.
Today's post, Something to Protect was originally published on 30 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Trust in Bayes, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.