Toby Tremlett🔹

Karma: 7,708

Hello! I’m Toby. I’m Content Strategist at CEA. I work with the Online Team to make sure the Forum is a great place to discuss doing the most good we can. You’ll see me posting a lot, authoring the EA Newsletter and curating Forum Digests, making moderator comments and decisions, and more.

Before working at CEA, I studied Philosophy at the University of Warwick, and worked for a couple of years on a range of writing and editing projects within the EA space. Recently I helped run the Amplify Creative Grants program, to encourage more impactful podcasting and YouTube projects. You can find a bit of my own creative output on my blog, and my podcast feed.

Toby Tremlett🔹 12 Dec 2025 13:41 UTC
10 points
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on: tobytrem’s Quick takes
Londoners!
@Gemma 🔸 is hosting a co-writing session this Sunday, for people who would like to write “Why I Donate” posts. The plan is to work in poms, and publish something during the session.

Toby Tremlett🔹 12 Dec 2025 11:05 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Charlotte Darnell’s comment on: Looking for a US based AI safety mentor for international high school research project
Thanks Charlotte!
Since this is still visible on the frontpage, I’ve changed the title. @Arthurwantstoknowmore, feel free to change it or suggest an alternative.

Toby Tremlett🔹 11 Dec 2025 10:16 UTC
6 points
3 ∶ 1
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: What EA texts would you recommend reading?
I personally love strangers drowning but I don’t think it’s a centrally EA text. It’s mostly about people who do good obsessively/ to serious extremes. I think it’s interesting to people who care about doing good but it’s not a manual in the way these other texts are.

Toby Tremlett🔹 10 Dec 2025 12:10 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
on: ‘Why I Donate’ Thread
There have been a couple moments in my life when I’ve been pierced by someone else’s suffering, before the “fat relentless ego”^[1] can catch up and mire everything in the soup of self-conscious self-reflective rationalisations. There is something true in those moments, and regular donation is a way to spread that truth out across time.

I.e. I donate because suffering seems bad, and I make it a habit/ commitment because I’m not always thinking about the suffering of others.
1. ^
  Fantastic Iris Murdoch quote from The Sovereignty of Good. Great trio of essays, strongly recommended. The content is mostly orthogonal to EA commitments (Murdoch’s version of doing good is quite blind to consequences), apart from the clearly serious striving to be good present across the essays.

‘Why I Donate’ Thread

Toby Tremlett🔹10 Dec 2025 11:38 UTC

16 points

3 comments1 min readEA link

Donation Election 2025 Winners

Toby Tremlett🔹10 Dec 2025 10:19 UTC

39 points

5 comments2 min readEA link

Toby Tremlett🔹 8 Dec 2025 12:38 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: tobytrem’s Quick takes
Last year @OscarD🔸 @Jason @huw pulled out some good insights.

Toby Tremlett🔹 8 Dec 2025 12:37 UTC
2 points
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on: tobytrem’s Quick takes
It looks like you might have to wait till tomorrow for a ‘Donation Election Winners’ post (though you can see the final votes on the banner). Until then—here are the anonymised votes to play with.

Toby Tremlett🔹 5 Dec 2025 15:12 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Tony Rost’s comment on: Open thread: 2025 Q4 (October—December)
Sounds awesome Tony.
Pretty similar (from this high level description) to the work of Eleos AI. Have you guys connected?

Toby Tremlett🔹 5 Dec 2025 13:57 UTC
11 points
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on: tobytrem’s Quick takes
Reminder that if we reach $15K, we’ll run a debate week of the Forum’s choice.

Toby Tremlett🔹 5 Dec 2025 13:11 UTC
10 points
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on: Donation Election Discussion Thread
Thanks to an anonymous Forum user who notified me about a couple instances of vote brigading, some votes have been nullified. Those whose votes are nullified will be able to vote again. This does mean that the ranking on the banner has changed a bit (but not drastically).

I’m not publicising the name(s) of the vote brigader(s) because this is mostly my bad—I didn’t send as many clear reminders of the rules of the competition to orgs who joined late. As far as I know, no one deserves a reputational hit for this one (well, yep apart from me, sorry all!).

Toby Tremlett🔹 4 Dec 2025 10:34 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Donation Election Discussion Thread
The donation election ‘I voted’ flair (pictured below) was broken until last night. If you vote again it should be added to your account!

(This is also a reminder that you can change your vote as many times as you like, and the deadline is Sunday)

Toby Tremlett🔹 3 Dec 2025 11:00 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: 3 Stages of Competition for the Long-Term Future
Love this as a lock-in diagram.
Years ago when I was working with Richard Fisher on The Long View, we were trying to come up with a good extended metaphor for lock-in. I was pretty stuck on the idea of a tilt-maze (which is intuitive but unfortunately the term means little to people reading).
The problem with the tilt maze is that it is binary—you are either totally free to move the ball wherever, or you are trapped in a hole. Your diagram works much better—it intuitively gives you the idea of more and less sticky troughs. You could also represent a more binary lock in with a deeper valley.