I'm not sure I understand your example as a distinction between altruism as an act of conscious self-interest vs. moral reasoning.
Perhaps there is a distinction between conscious self-interest and unconscious self-interest?
It was a more general distinction between doing something because you consciously want it and doing something because you evolved to. Reading this again, I should have made that more clear.
The way you get helped by altruism isn't entirely well-understood. It's not clear how it's changed since the ancestral environment. As such, it's not clear what we're doing wrong, and what we'd change if it was self-interest we actually cared about.
What is something you used to believe, preferably something concrete with direct or implied predictions, that you now know was dead wrong. Was your belief rational given what you knew and could know back then, or was it irrational, and why?
Edit: I feel like some of these are getting a bit glib and political. Please try to explain what false assumptions or biases were underlying your beliefs - be introspective - this is LW after all.