Sounds like you're defining "works" as whatever's convenient to your argument.
The military can and will kick your ass, it doesn't need to be efficient to do that.
The Gates foundation is well known for making progress on eradicating polio, among other measures.
If we're defining self-sacrifice as deliberately working for a below-market salary for the benefit of others, you just defined pretty much every high-skill government employee. Every FBI agent, every general, every agency staffer could almost certainly make more in the private sector. Many of them stay out of a sense of duty and service, and because they want their work to be meaningful.
I don't know how you don't say startups aren't staffed by people deliberately working at a loss. Almost by default startups pay less in salary with the vague promise of outsized gains on company stock when it goes public. Startups are also often started by idealists who want to try and put a vision out there into the world, and are willing to make giant sacrifice to achieve that vision. Usually that vision involves improving other peoples' lives in some way "making the world a better place" and all that.
If you want to drill down deep enough any action that produces emotional reward is selfishly motivated, by that logic the only selfless actions are the ones that make us miserable without any hope of a reward, which is a very useless way to define selflessness as it excludes nearly all human activity.
The military can and will kick your ass, it doesn't need to be efficient to do that.
The Gates foundation is well known for making progress on eradicating polio, among other measures.
If we're defining self-sacrifice as deliberately working for a below-market salary for the benefit of others, you just defined pretty much every high-skill government employee. Every FBI agent, every general, every agency staffer could almost certainly make more in the private sector. Many of them stay out of a sense of duty and service, and because they want their work to be meaningful.
I don't know how you don't say startups aren't staffed by people deliberately working at a loss. Almost by default startups pay less in salary with the vague promise of outsized gains on company stock when it goes public. Startups are also often started by idealists who want to try and put a vision out there into the world, and are willing to make giant sacrifice to achieve that vision. Usually that vision involves improving other peoples' lives in some way "making the world a better place" and all that.
If you want to drill down deep enough any action that produces emotional reward is selfishly motivated, by that logic the only selfless actions are the ones that make us miserable without any hope of a reward, which is a very useless way to define selflessness as it excludes nearly all human activity.