Toby Tremlett

Karma: 2,356

Hello! I’m Toby. I’m Content Manager at CEA. I work with Lizka and 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 20 Jun 2024 11:18 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: connorpmullins’s comment on: Introductions and questions thread: April—June 2024
Hi Connor!
Welcome to the EA Forum! Let me know if I can help you get a hang of the Forum/ find the content you’re looking for.
Cheers,
Toby (Content Manager for the EA Forum).

Toby Tremlett 20 Jun 2024 11:17 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Benjamin H’s comment on: Introductions and questions thread: April—June 2024
Hi Ben!
Not sure the EA Forum is quite the real world, but you’re getting closer. Welcome, and let me know if you have any questions about the Forum.
Cheers,
Toby (Content Manager for the EA Forum).

Toby Tremlett 20 Jun 2024 11:16 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: BronsonSchoen’s comment on: Introductions and questions thread: April—June 2024
Hi Bronson! Welcome to the EA Forum! Let me know if you have any questions about how to use the Forum/ find the content you are looking for.

Toby Tremlett 20 Jun 2024 11:15 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Nigel Masenda’s comment on: Introductions and questions thread: April—June 2024
Hey Nigel, welcome to the Forum! Feel free to message me or comment here if you have any questions.
Cheers, Toby (Content Manager for the EA Forum)

EA Organization Updates: June 2024

Toby Tremlett18 Jun 2024 8:56 UTC

21 points

0 comments5 min readEA link

Announcing AI Welfare Debate Week (July 1-7)

Toby Tremlett18 Jun 2024 8:06 UTC

70 points

2 comments3 min readEA link

Toby Tremlett 12 Jun 2024 12:36 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Yannick_Muehlhaeuser’s comment on: Summary of Situational Awareness—The Decade Ahead
Seems like a helpful addition to the debate—have you considered link-posting it (in full)?

Toby Tremlett 4 Jun 2024 15:22 UTC
5 points
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on: titotal on AI risk scepticism
Thanks for sharing these. To prioritise my reading a bit (if you have time): which arguments do you find particularly useful and why?

Toby Tremlett 4 Jun 2024 9:39 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby Tremlett’s comment on: tobytrem’s Quick takes
after EAG conversations, my current best guess for the debate statement is “the future will be worse if we create artificial sentience”

Toby Tremlett 1 Jun 2024 7:28 UTC
9 points
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on: tobytrem’s Quick takes
If you’re currently at EAG London and you still see this quick take, you’re exactly the person we’d like to meet:

EAG London Meetup: EA Forum readers and writers | Saturday 5-6pm at Meeting point G
Some members of the EA Forum online team are holding a casual meetup for EA Forum readers and writers to get to know each other (and us). Join us if you’d like to find a co-author, meet someone who can give you feedback on your draft, or make suggestions to the EA Forum team. We’ll meet at meeting point G, unless otherwise stated.

Toby Tremlett 30 May 2024 12:41 UTC
17 points
1 ∶ 0
on: AI companies aren’t really using external evaluators
I’m curating this post.
I wrote a draft for a feature on a politico piece for the EA newsletter, exploring this same question—are big labs following through on verbal commitments to share their models with external evaluators? Despite taking “several months” to speak with experts- the politico piece didn’t have as much useful information as this blog post. I cut the feature, because I couldn’t find as much information in the time I had.
I think work like this is really valuable, filling a serious gap in our understanding of AI Safety. Thanks for writing this Zach!

Toby Tremlett 30 May 2024 11:21 UTC
20 points
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on: tobytrem’s Quick takes
In late June, the Forum will be holding a debate week (almost definitely) on the topic of digital minds. Like the AI pause debate week, I’ll encourage specific authors who have thoughts on this issue to post, but all interested Forum users are also encouraged to take part. Also, we will have an interactive banner to track Forum user’s opinions and how they change throughout the week.
I’m still formulating the exact debate statement, so I’m very open for input here! I’d like to see people discuss: whether digital minds should be an EA cause area, how bad putting too much or too little effort into digital minds could be, and whether there are any promising avenues for further work in the domain. I’d like a statement which is fairly clear, so that the majority of debate doesn’t end up being semantic.

The debate statement will be a value statement of the form ‘X is the case’ rather than a prediction ‘X will happen before Y’. For example, we could discuss how much we agree with the statement ‘Digital minds should be a top 5 EA cause area’—but this is specific suggestion is uncomfortably vague.
Do you have any suggestions for alternative statements? I’m also open to feedback on the general topic. Feel free to dm rather than comment if you prefer.

Toby Tremlett 21 May 2024 10:36 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Ramiro’s comment on: Ramiro’s Shortform
FWIW EV has been off-boarding its projects, so it isn’t surprising that Asterisk is now nested under something else. I don’t know anything about Obelus Inc.

Toby Tremlett 21 May 2024 8:30 UTC
3 points
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on: Policy advocacy for eradicating screwworm looks remarkably cost-effective
This is great, thanks for sharing!
Bad news for the people employed to drop 14.7 million infertile screwworm on the Panama-Columbia border every week though :’(

Toby Tremlett 20 May 2024 10:13 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: EmmanuelKatto’s comment on: New Member—Emmanuel Katto
Hi Emmanuel! You can just comment the contents of this post in there :)

Toby Tremlett 20 May 2024 9:40 UTC
4 points
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on: tobytrem’s Quick takes
Draft guidelines for new topic tags (feedback welcome)

Topics (AKA wiki pages^[1] or tags^[2]) are used to organise Forum posts into useful groupings. They can be used to give readers context on a debate that happens only intermittently (see Time of Perils), collect news and events which might interest people in a certain region (see Greater New York City Area), collect the posts by an organisation, or, perhaps most importantly, collect all the posts on a particular subject (see Prediction Markets).
Any user can submit and begin using a topic. They can do this most easily by clicking “Add topic” on the topic line at the top of any post. However, before being permanently added to our list of topics, all topics are vetted by the Forum facilitation team. This quick take outlines some requirements and suggestions for new topics to make this more transparent. Similar, more polished, advice will soon be available on the ‘add topic’ page. Please give feedback if you disagree with any of these requirements.
When you add a new topic, ensure that:
1. The topic, or a very similar topic, does not already exist. If a very similar topic already exists, consider adding detail to that topic wiki page rather than creating a new topic.
2. You have used your topic to tag at least three posts by different authors (not including yourself). You will have to do this after creating the topic. The topic must describe a central theme in each post. If you cannot yet tag three relevant posts, the Forum probably doesn’t need this topic yet.
3. You’ve added at least a couple of sentences to define the term and explain how the topic tag should be used.
Not fulfilling these requirements is the most likely cause of a topic rejection. In particular, many topics are written with the aim of establishing a new term or idea, rather than collecting terms and ideas which already exist on the Forum. Other examples of rejected topics include:
- Topic pages created for an individual. In certain cases, we permit these tags, for example, if the person is associated with a philosophy or set of ideas that is often discussed (see Peter Singer) and which can be clearly picked out by their name. However, in most cases, we don’t want tags for individuals because there would be far too many, and posts about individuals can generally be found through search without using tags.
- Topics which are applicable to posts on the EA Forum, but which aren’t used by Forum users. For example, many posts could technically be described as “Risk Management”. However, EA forum users use other terms to refer to risk management content.
1. ^
  Technically there can be a wiki page without a topic tag, i.e. a wiki page that cannot be applied to a post. However we don’t really use these, so in practice the terms are interchangeable.
2. ^
  This term is used more informally. It is easier to say “I’m tagging this post” than “I’m topic-ing this post”

Toby Tremlett 16 May 2024 9:55 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: ArielPayIt4ward’s comment on: Introductions and questions thread: April—June 2024
Hey Sarah/Ariel, welcome to the Forum!
Based on your interests, you might be perfect for this program.
Hope you enjoy hanging out here- let me know if you have any questions about EA, or using the Forum.
Cheers,
Toby (content manager for the EA Forum)

EA Organization Updates: May 2024

Toby Tremlett15 May 2024 9:36 UTC

29 points

0 comments8 min readEA link

Toby Tremlett 9 May 2024 14:56 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Sebastian Kreisel’s comment on: Introductions and questions thread: April—June 2024
Thanks for joining Sebastian! Your AISF project sounds really interesting, and I’m sure people would love to see it on the Forum some day :)
- Toby (Content Manager for the EA Forum)

Toby Tremlett 9 May 2024 13:13 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: ezrah’s comment on: tobytrem’s Quick takes
Thank you!

Toby Tremlett

EA Or­ga­ni­za­tion Up­dates: June 2024

An­nounc­ing AI Welfare De­bate Week (July 1-7)

Draft guidelines for new topic tags (feedback welcome)

EA Or­ga­ni­za­tion Up­dates: May 2024

EA Organization Updates: June 2024

Announcing AI Welfare Debate Week (July 1-7)

EA Organization Updates: May 2024