Comment by creata
4 days ago
> You probably haven't heard about the ones that are succeeding at doing cool stuff because people don't gossip about charitable successes.
People do gossip about charitable successes.
Anyway, aren't capital-R Rationalists typically very online about what they do? If there are any amazing success stories you want to bring up (and I'm not saying they do or don't exist) surely you can just link to some of them?
One problem is, making $300k annually and donating $200k of it to charitable causes such as curing malaria does not make an interesting story. Maybe it saved thousands of lives, maybe not, but we can't even point at specific people who were saved... and malaria still exists, so... not an interesting story to tell.
A more exciting story would be e.g. about Scott Alexander, who was harassed by a Wikipedia admin and lost his job because he was doxed by a major newspaper, but emerged stronger than before (that's the interesting part), and he also keeps donating a fraction of his income to charitable causes (that's the charitable part, i.e. the boring part).
Most rationalists' success stories are less extreme than this. Most of them wouldn't make good clickbait.