I encourage everyone to lower their achievement bar all the way down to "minimize harm". There is no rational reason to beat yourself up for not reaching some arbitrary goalpost, even if it is one that you set for yourself and was arguably achievable. Life happens, and new circumstances and data can easily shift things. 

For example, if you were hit by a bus and in the ICU recovering, no one would expect you to be productive. Why is it any different for milder versions? Have the flu or a cold? Didn't sleep well last night? Completely exhausted and burnt out?

"Should" is the most insidious word we use. "I should be able to achieve more or give more or be better". Love and accept yourself where you are. Then, if you want to make step towards improvement, do so. But keep them small and don't compare against others or hypotheticals. The only comparison that matters is against yourself.

I agree it is a factor, but it is naïve to think that is the only explanation.

Alcohol is indeed a Class 1 carcinogen. As the WHO says bluntly, “No level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health.”

But it is also one of the nine factors in Blue Zones—longevity outlier populations.

So, how to explain the contraction? The power of community and relationships:

The positive effects of consistent, strong, and healthy relationships are so much more powerful than other factors, they become essentially rounding errors in the equation.

I overall agree that alcohol is a net negative to society. But if it is ingested in moderation as part of social bonding rituals like evening meals together or spiritual services, the positive effects of these rituals on our health—especially bolstering our amazing immune systems that constantly repair mild to moderate damage in our bodies—more than make up for the negatives of the alcohol.

In the infinite game there is no win condition

The winning condition is that the game is still ongoing. As long as the infinite game is in progress, it is in the winning state.

I recommend updating the title to something like "From Google to global health NGO". 

At first glance, I thought this said "Google is founding a new global health charity."

To scale solutions, we need more money than people, since money can not only deploy solutions but also hire more people

Well, it's unfortunate, but the fundamental goal of Effective Altruism is rational investment, and that means, among other things, not investing based on emotions.

This is wrong; it's a black-or-white logical fallacy. Emotions are an important channel of data. Not factoring them into calculations leads to false conclusions. Check out bilateral amygdala damage or frontotemporal dementia.

EA discourages emotion-only or emotion-overweighted decision-making. However, if emotion were not a part of EA, we would simply give every dollar to bednets in Africa and ignore every other cause.

Maybe I'm misreading your argument, but you seem to say there are legitimate cases to be made for 100% investment in humans, at the expense of complete obliteration of the remainder of the animal kingdom. The whole ecosystem we rely on for survival would collapse.

I might agree with you that the planet would be better off long term if we devoted 100% to animals and, conversely, obliterated all the people. There are (at least) two things wrong with this other extreme scenario, though:

1. It values human flourishing at zero, which is antithetical to EA
2. We might be the only higher consciousness in the Galaxy, or even the Universe, with a non-zero risk of ours being the only one that arises. It would be a massive loss to have the next googol years play out unaware.

Telling people what they should do is antithetical to respect and agency and human flourishing. Making moral arguments is one thing, but authoritarianism crosses the line. IMHO.

The "highest-lowest" game mechanic is a valuable lens when thinking about balancing investments. It's pretty clear the extremes are wrong (100% people, 0% animals, or the inverse). That means there is some middle ground that makes sense.

I trust the wisdom of the crowd. Some are drawn to human welfare, others to animal welfare. Some to both. The more we educate everyone on the issues and give them the agency to make their own decisions on where to invest resources, the more likely we are to come to a reasonable balance point.

'what does the community incentivise?' vs 'what does the community say?'

Reminds me of the quote from the Netflix Culture document: 

The actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.