Yep, he occasionally shared memes in that group but left it a while ago. 

Thanks for sharing your story when we met in Berlin and writing this up! I saved it to read later. 

This made me think of an EA friend of mine, who spent a year after high school doing voluntary military service in Switzerland before embarking on his altruist (later EA) career. IIRC he found it helpful to learn discipline and grit early on in his career. I feel like focus, discipline and grit might be underrated skills in our current time of abundant distractions, and the military might be one of the best places to learn this. Other jobs in a high stress environment with supportive colleagues might also work, such as top management consulting firms, or multi-day silent meditation retreats like Vipassana. Not sure how well each translates to better focus at (EA) jobs. 

Curious if you have any thoughts on this!

I'd love to read high quality critiques of this, especially the suggested timeline and likelihood. If you know any, please share! 

I feel like mainstream people like EA until they understand the implications and are faced with their first trade-off for who to help. To keep them engaged, maybe the new CEA could skip the prioritization part and just focus on making people feel better about their first choice. 

I'm sure you had no bad intentions with this, but including a "buy a $100 ticket" offer to a fictional lottery with your actual PayPal link on an April Fools joke seems.. unnecessary maybe? Also, more importantly, a missed opportunity for Rickrolling :) 

Btw, Karl Lauterbach, the former German minister of health, has mentioned "effective altruism" in a press conference as a framework to help justify covid measures during the pandemic. If one of Germany's top ~10 politicians (at the time) can risk that, you can too ;)

Consider that, in addition to doing nothing yourself, you can also discourage others from doing anything. 

Write a nit-picky critique, say something vague like "I don't you should do this" without any further explanation, defer to authority. 

We need to ensure that no-one does anything if they're not at least 98% confident that they're the world's most qualified person to do the thing. 

I think you made a mistake here, let me correct:  

>  Doing things is not your comparative advantage. Someone else would  could do it better.

It doesn't matter if none of the better suited people are actually doing it, just the fact that they could do a better job is sufficient to sit back and relax. If you want to do more, you could write a forum post arguing that 'someone should do this' and let the universe take care of the rest. 

I really appreciate April's Fools Day! 

We're so focussed on epistemic rigour and all that jeez that I sometimes forget how funny we can be, and I'm really glad we made April Fool's a tradition to have an outlet for that, at least once a year (wouldn't mind more often to be honest). 

Speficially, I like all the posts, especially @Emma Richter🔸 's spicy Centre for Effective Altruism Is No Longer "Effective Altruism"-Related, and the new forum features like new "😁-react" the cheerful lightbulbs that show up when pressing any button: 
 

Can we keep that please? 

This is easy to say now, but what if we run out of low-hanging cherries to pick?