There is an ideal where each person seeks a telos that they can personally pursue in a way that is consistent with an open, fair, prosperous society and, upon adopting such a telos for themselves, they seek to make the pursuit of that telos by themselves and their assembled team into something locally efficient. Living up to this ideal is good, even though haters gonna hate.

Status hierarchies and loss aversion probably explain a large part of what you observe in people who aren't onboard with the principles you've outlined. For most people, ancestral environment status matters a lot, which means what other people think is a top priority because the ancestral environment was mostly small groups who all knew you and whose opinions determined how good your life would be. Loss aversion means that rocking the boat just isn't something most people are willing to do.

1. There’s a real way to do anything, and a fake way; we need to make sure we’re doing the real version.
2. It is our job to do stuff that’s better than the societal mainstream.
3. Pointless busywork is bad.

Starting from this, your points 1, 2, and 3 are all in obvious contrast to the default. People want to do what they're told and avoid causing trouble that might impact their social standing in the eyes of their peers.

4. If we’re doing something worthwhile, not literally everyone will like it.
5. It’s important to have an honorable purpose; commercial purposes can be honorable.

Points 4 and 5 seem quite contradictory to my experience of general human nature. Everyone loves to hate successful people, and especially people who are commercially successful. Success upsets status hierarchies, and so it is in the interest of most people to try to reduce the status of the newly successful in order to minimize loss of status to themselves and to their in-groups. Someone with an honorable purpose who doesn't achieve success, though, is generally thought quite well of.

6. Remember to include the outsiders (and all young people start out as outsiders).

Point 6 is directly contradictory to human nature and the desire to support the in-group and keep down the out-group.

In the broader rationalist community, the norms described by the OP are probably more obvious than not. Even in a higher education setting, they will be more prevalent than in the general population. But within the general population, "don't rock the boat" is the rule of thumb. Most people find this way of living comfortable. A very few chafe against it until they happen upon a community where the norms you outlined exist and finally feel like they've come home. People who have been fortunate enough to grow up isolated from the norms of broader society often seem to be confused by just how "non-agentic, unambitious, and obsessed with social approval" the average person is. Setting this as your baseline and realizing that you we need to overcome it every step of the way, in others and sometimes in ourselves, is an important step in making a difference in the world.

If I read this and understood it 1 year ago, it would have saved me the painful process of discovering these patterns myself. This was a gaping hole in my world model. Something about being a student of history gave me a false sense of distance from these patterns. I thought I was living in a world where machiavellian environments would not be something I had to think about at all. Slowly, cracks formed and then all at once, that worldview shattered.

So, what do we do about this? It seems intuitively important to at least develop the ability to identify what kind of environment, political or driven by measurable impact, you're looking at. This is especially difficult when that environment is systematically lying to you (in job postings, for example). And besides that, the same thing would be valuable to learn about all the people in your management chain at a corporation.

This is very validating and it gives me more thinking to do. Thank you for sharing this.

Some people do not have the intuition that organizations should run as efficiently as possible and avoid wasting time or resources.

Some of us don't want every organization to be turned into an Amazon warehouse. An organization that runs as efficiently as possible and wastes no time at all is one that's pretty hellish to work in.

if you’re in a dysfunctional organization where everything is about private fiefdoms instead of getting things done…why not…leave?

Because the dysfunctional organization pays well. Or the the commute is really short, and I'd rather not move. Or this job allows me to stay close to a sick or elderly family member that I care for. Or perhaps the dysfunctional organization is sponsoring my visa, and it'd be difficult to leave and remain in the country. Maybe my co-workers are really nice. Or I think that any other organization that would hire me would be just as dysfunctional, or dysfunctional in a different way.

There are lots of reasons that people continue to work for inefficient organizations.

Excellent points. My experience is that people in general do not like to think that the things they are doing are could be done in other ways or not at all, because that means that they have to rethink their own role and purpose. 

Thanks for this post, I found it very useful.

While I agree with you that these things should go without saying, I think I’m not so surprised that they don’t actually go without saying? 
In particular, I often notice that most of these things don’t seem to go without saying even for myself? There is obviously a good way of doing things, but (I assume ultimately because of something like a low opinion of one’s own competence, warranted or not), noticing that we’re doing something else instead is hard, and carefully tracking one’s impact is also hard. It is our job to do things better, but noticing that might come with eg. anxiety, beyond the fact that doing things better is in itself hard? Etc.

I kinda wish I wasn’t writing this: anyone reading this was most likely already aware of the point I’m making, and I don’t particularly feel proud of going "yes, motivating ourselves to become better and improve the world is awesome, but have you considered that sometimes it’s mildly inconvenient?". Still: sometimes it is in fact difficult, and, in the examples that come most readily to my mind at least, the bulk of what makes it difficult is some kind of anxiety of not being competent enough, or something along these lines.

Hence the question: the content of this post, while obviously true, does not in fact always go without saying: how could we make it more likely that it goes without saying more often and for more people?

Overall I agree, however I have a nitpick about point 2.

People differ a lot in how much they defy societal defaults, and do so at all points of both intelligence and domain competence spectra. I would not bet that "trust your reasoning more than the default choice", especially outside ones few competence domains, is good advice on average, not even for LessWrong readers. Maybe it is, maybe it is not.

E.g. I can easily intuit that the education system in my own country is far from optimal along any reasonable metric: its evolution is not driven by clear goals, nor by especially competent people, there are clear failings in attracting talented teachers etc. It does not mean that I know any single affordable action that I can take that would in expectation improve the system (or the education of someone I cared about whose default path is trough this system).

I believe taking the "normal" options for all choices that do not affect your top priorities and/or intersect with your particular comparative advantages is, in fact, a good policy.

I do tend to doubt what I should invest my efforts into. If I'm not really sure they get paid back, I'm inclined to hesitate. That's why my decision what to invest into might depend on other people's reactions unless I'm damn sure. Though, I'm trying to shift this dependency point to data. For me, solely inner motivation isn't enough.

It's cool to put this to paper. I tried writing down my most fundamental principles and noticed I thought they were tautological and also realized many people disagree with them. Like "If you believe something is right you believe others are wrong." Many, many people have a belief "everyone's entitled to their own opinion" that overrules this one.

Or "if something is wrong you shouldn't do it." Sounds... tautological. But again, many people don't think that's really true when it comes to abstractly reasoned "effective altruism" type stuff. It's just an ocean of incomprehensible rightness and wrongness, better to focus on yourself and your loved ones.

"Corruption is bad." Nick Rafter recently had an article showing how your prior should really just be that elites manage corruption and normal people really don't care, they just want results.

"Belief is both rational and emotional/psychological/biological"... yep, that angers people on both sides.