Good rationalists have an absurd advantage over the field in altruism, and only a marginal advantage in highly optimized status arenas like tech startups. The human brain is already designed to be effective when it comes to status competitions, and systematically ineffective when it comes to helping other people.
So it's much more of a tragedy for the competent rationalist to choose to spend most of their time competing in those things than to shoot a shot at a wacky idea you have for helping others. You might reasonably expect to be better at it than 99% of the people who (respectably!) attempt to do so. Consider not burning that advantage!
I don't think I agree with the premise, but it's a really weird comparison. "advantage over the field" is kind of meaningless for altruism, where the goal really should be cooperation with the field in improvements for (subsets of) people. Tech startups ALSO benefit from this attitude, in that you're trying to align your company to provide more utility to customers, though it also includes more explicit competition among companies and individuals.
Tech startups (and lucrative employment in non-startups) ARE a much bigger arena, so the competitiv... (read more)