Toby Tremlett🔹

EA Or­ga­ni­za­tion Up­dates: May 2025

• Toby Tremlett🔹May 9, 2025, 2:02 PM

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Clara Torres Latorre 🔶️’s comment on: Open thread: April—June 2025

  Yep quick takes are the best spot for more speculative, early stage, or short thoughts :)

• Toby Tremlett🔹May 9, 2025, 8:36 AM

  6 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: Pod­cast epi­sode with Michael St. Jules

  Very cool, will listen. Have you considered posting a transcript? It’s super easy with AI now (use one AI to make a transcript, and another one to clean it up and make it more grammatical).

• Toby Tremlett🔹May 9, 2025, 8:25 AM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Clara Torres Latorre 🔶️’s comment on: Open thread: April—June 2025

  Hey Clara, congrats on taking the pledge!
  My guess on this question is that you’d need a lot more people to give before you saw macro-economic effects. But people’s giving does differ greatly country to country, so I’m sure there is some economic work on the effects of that on savings, investment, wages etc!
  Also- welcome to the Forum! Let me know if you have any questions about how it works.

• Toby Tremlett🔹May 8, 2025, 4:08 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: to­bytrem’s Quick takes

  This is just a quick note to let you know that polls-in-posts weren’t just for DIY debate week. You can use them at any time.

  More about the feature, and how to use it, in this post.

• Toby Tremlett🔹May 1, 2025, 2:42 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Crit­i­cism on the EA Forum

  Fantastic! I’ve linked it at the bottom of the post.

• Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 30, 2025, 12:17 PM

  6 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: De­bate: should EA avoid us­ing AI art out­side of re­search?

  Should EA avoid using AI art for non-research purposes?

  Treating “agree” as “yes”

  I think the strongest reason against (using AI art for non-research purposes) for me is the idea of all the uncompensated art that made up the data. It’s a bit of an original sin for AI in general (including text generation), and not one which we’ve found a good response to.
  
  Reasons for (using AI art for non-research purposes):
  - It makes sense for EAs to adopt a place in the memetic space where we think that AI is and will be very powerful (and therefore it’s important to learn how to use it), and it’s likely to be very dangerous. I don’t think there is a contradiction there, and avoiding the use of AI would be increasingly hobbling. This is relevant because I don’t think we can make a clean distinction between AI generated art and AI generated text—both are likely built on an amount of stolen/​ un-compensated data.
  - Using AI images (like bulby above) is just a bit of fun, i.e. the scale of use is pretty small—this correlates with this not being a very big deal.

  - A lot of the concerns are hypothetical comms concerns, I’d take this more seriously if things played out that way, but right now I’d guess that the anti-AI-use camp is fairly loud but not strategically useful. And since I disagree with them for the other reasons above, I’d rather not pretend that I do for optics reasons.

  Overall: I’m definitely open to changing my mind on this. I especially don’t feel like I have a principled response to the un-compensated labour that went into creating AI, and it’d be great to have one.

• Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 29, 2025, 3:23 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Will Aldred’s comment on: Three polls: on timelines and cause prio

  This is helpful. If this was actually for a debate week, I’d have made it ‘more than 5% extinction risk this century’ and (maybe) excluded risks from AI.

• Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 29, 2025, 1:30 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Will Aldred’s comment on: Three polls: on timelines and cause prio

  I’m a pretty strong anti-realist but this is one of the strongest types of shoulds for me.
  I.e. ‘If you want to achieve the best consequences, then you should expect the majority of affectable consequences to be in the far future’ Seems like the kind of thing that could be true or false on non-normative grounds, and would normatively ground a ‘should’ if you are already committed to consequentialism. In the sense that believing “I should get to Rome as fast as possible” and “The fastest way to get to Rome is to take a flight” grounds a ‘should’ for “I should take a flight to Rome”.

• Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 29, 2025, 1:27 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: Three polls: on timelines and cause prio

  However people interpret the question is how we should discuss it, but when I was writing it, I was wondering about whether bioweapons can cause extinction/​ existential risks or not per se. I.e. can bioweapons either:
  a) kill everyone

  b) Kill enough of the population, forever, such that we can never achieve much as a species.
  I’m not sure about the feasibility of either.

• Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 29, 2025, 1:23 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: TFD’s comment on: Crit­i­cism on the EA Forum

  Thanks for this comment! I think you’ve pointed out a few places where this post clearly isn’t comprehensive. I’m not sure how frequently asked these questions will be, but in case they are, some quickfire answers:

  If someone makes a post that criticizes someone on the forum but does not reach out to the target of their criticism first, would you consider that to be violating a norm of the forum, even if that violation won’t result in any enforcement?

  No—I mistakenly used the word norms in an ambiguous sentence in the second section. I’ve changed the word to practices. Reaching out to a critiqued organisation or person, or giving right of reply are ‘practices we’d like to encourage’ rather than new norms. In practice this means that we (the mods) will advise people to follow these practices in many cases, and in many cases, will help reduce friction (by doing the reaching out on the critics behalf for example).

  What is in scope for “criticism” in this context?

  This is a good question. I could cop out with a “I know it when I see it” which is partially true. But broadly I think the type of criticism we are more concerned about/​ would more strongly encourage to follow these practices is criticism which could damage the reputation of an organisation or individual if was read without a response. General disagreement/​ critical engagement with the ideas of an organisation could technically fall into this category, but is generally read as more collaborative than as an accusation of wrongdoing. Tone probably matters a bit here. Others on the mod team may have different views on this question.

  I think its not uncommon that critics and their targets have major disagreements about whether these types of beliefs are reasonable. When can one invoke this type of reasoning for not reaching out?

  When it’s reasonable to do so. I think the Forum is naturally quite sceptical and won’t let bad faith arguments stand for long, so in many cases, I don’t think it will matter if a bad faith response is published alongside a critique. But it’s a little hard to form a principle here (hence practices, not norms).

• Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 29, 2025, 1:13 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Crit­i­cism on the EA Forum

  Good idea! If you make one I’d link it in the post.

• Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 29, 2025, 1:10 PM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: TFD’s comment on: Crit­i­cism on the EA Forum

  Will respond to other points in a sec, but on the “encourage” and “norms” distinction—I’ll go and edit the post to make sure I’m consistent here. The aim was to separate strong forum norms from these practices that I’d like to promote and make easier around criticism. I don’t think it would be reasonable to make right of reply a norm in the way not being rude on the Forum is a norm.

• Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 29, 2025, 1:07 PM

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Crit­i­cism on the EA Forum

  Yep, I think that’s fair, and that’s part of why these are general practices that we’ll be trying to promote/​ helping happen rather than strong norms we would moderate. Getting a response isn’t always a reasonable ask, but if I can, I’d like to lower friction for Forum authors.

• Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 29, 2025, 7:53 AM

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Will Aldred’s comment on: Will Al­dred’s Shortform

  I’ve let @Will Howard🔹 know—people probably don’t see the cross/​ don’t intuitively see the cross as doing what it does.

Three polls: on timelines and cause prio

• Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 28, 2025, 8:37 AM

  18 points

  4 ∶ 2

  on: Poll: Should peo­ple with more fo­rum karma have more pow­er­ful votes?

  Vote power should scale with karma

  A few quick thoughts:
  
  Scaled voting power is part of why moderation on the Forum is sustainable. When I see posts downvoted past zero I agree the majority of the time.
  Karma is an imperfect but still very helpful measure of how useful a writer has been to the EA Forum community. Therefore, high karma correlates pretty well with people having good Forum content taste.
  
  I disagree with the “groupthink” idea because I don’t see strong downvotes being used to suppress good, on-topic content the majority of the time (when I do, I strong upvote it). I can imagine a world where this system did go wrong (if high karma users represent an old orthodoxy that new users wanted to move past for example). But I don’t see this issue in reality.
  
  Definitely open to hearing more about this and seeing examples of the system going wrong! And thanks for raising the question Henry :)

Crit­i­cism on the EA Forum

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