Toby Tremlett🔹

Karma: 5,337

Hello! I’m Toby. I’m Content Manager 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🔹Apr 2, 2025, 2:51 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: Open thread: April—June 2025
You can find some more related groups here.

Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 2, 2025, 2:50 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: Open thread: April—June 2025
Ah—I do however see that they are focused on physical engineers, and your blog is for software engineers. Maybe I was mislead by an ambiguous term

Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 2, 2025, 2:48 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Antony Henao’s comment on: Open thread: April—June 2025
No worries! Hope it’s useful. Looks as if they could benefit from your expertise :)

Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 2, 2025, 2:40 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Antony Henao’s comment on: Open thread: April—June 2025
Hey Antony!
Do you know about High Impact Engineers? Also, welcome to the Forum! I’m here if you have any questions,
Toby (Content Manager for the EA Forum)

Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 2, 2025, 2:38 PM
2 points
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in reply to: Dee Tomic’s comment on: Open thread: April—June 2025
That’s awesome to hear Dee! I’m the Forum’s Content Manager, let me know if you want help finding anything, answering any questions, etc… :)

Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 2, 2025, 9:20 AM
15 points
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on: tobytrem’s Quick takes
For those among us who want to get straight back to business—I’ve tagged (I think) all the april fools posts, so you can now filter them out of your frontpage if you prefer by adding the “April Fools’ Day” tag under the “Customize feed” button at the top of the frontpage, and changing the filter to hidden.

Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 2, 2025, 9:17 AM
6 points
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on: (Forum) Appreciation Thread
Thanks for making this thread!
So much to be grateful for. One thing that often brings me joy is the fantastic content that people write for the Forum, even when it benefits the community far more than it benefits them. There are definitely personal gains to be had by writing on the Forum, but a lot of great work is done from a position of altruism as well. I get a lot of job satisfaction from seeing great discussion on the Forum, whether it’s during an event or just a random week. Maybe this is a bit too generic—but I think the quantity of great content on this Forum is kind of ridiculous when you zoom out a bit, and I won’t stop being grateful for it (and looking the gifthorse straight in the mouth by trying to get more).

Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 1, 2025, 4:00 PM
15 points
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on: tobytrem’s Quick takes
SummaryBotV2 didn’t seem to get more agree reacts than V1, so I’m shutting it down. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 1, 2025, 3:29 PM
2 points
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in reply to: GideonF’s comment on: Insect Suffering Is The Biggest Issue And What To Do About It
(all April Fools posts will be labelled prominently as such from tomorrow. Got to say this in parentheses or it ruins the fun)

Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 1, 2025, 9:02 AM
22 points
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on: We’re revamping the Intro Fellowship!
You have my macbook

Open thread: April—June 2025

Toby Tremlett🔹Apr 1, 2025, 8:39 AM

4 points

9 comments1 min readEA link

Toby Tremlett🔹Mar 28, 2025, 10:14 AM
5 points
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on: tobytrem’s Quick takes
Listened to this episode of the Dwarkesh podcast yesterday—Dwarkesh mentioned that book reviews are a great way to produce useful content, even when you don’t have something to say yourself. I’m mentioning this because I think the Forum could benefit from more book reviews (or paper reviews, or podcast reviews).

Is anyone reading a book they think the Forum audience would benefit from reading? Fancy writing a review of it?

Toby Tremlett🔹Mar 27, 2025, 11:02 AM
8 points
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in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: NickLaing’s Quick takes
I’m also very keen to get more global health content! One thing people can do to help is suggest bloggers/ substackers etc… who write on global health topics relevant to EA. I can talk to them and offer them automated crossposting and support.

Toby Tremlett🔹Mar 21, 2025, 11:36 AM
6 points
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in reply to: Jason’s comment on: 80,000 Hours is shifting its strategic approach to focus more on AGI
I love point 3 “to the extent that I see something as core infrastructure that is a natural near-monopoly (e.g., the Forum, university groups) [...] I think there’s an enhanced obligation to share the commons”—that’s a good articulation of something I feel about Forum stewardship.

Toby Tremlett🔹Mar 21, 2025, 9:35 AM
4 points
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in reply to: jackva’s comment on: jackva’s Quick takes
Thanks for engaging on this as well! I do feel the responsibility involved in setting event topics, and it’s great to get constructive criticism like this.
To respond to the points a bit (and this is just my view- quite quickly written because I’ve got a busy day today and I’m happy to come back and clarify/change my mind in another reply):

(a) - maybe, but I think the actual content of the events almost always contains some scepticism of the question itself, discussion of adjacent debates etc… The actual topic of the event doesn’t seem like a useful place to look for evidence on the community’s priorities. Also, I generally run events about topics I think people aren’t prioritising. However, I think this is the point I disagree with the least—I can see that if you are looking at the forum in a pretty low-res way, or hearing about the event from a friend, you might get an impression that ‘EA cares about X now’.

(b) - The Forum does appear in EA-critical pieces, but I personally don’t think those pieces distinguish much between what one post on the Forum says and what the Forum team puts in a banner (and I don’t think readers who lack context would distinguish between those things either). So, I don’t worry too much about what I’m saying in the eyes of a very adversarial journalist (there are enough words on the forum that they can probably find whatever they’d like to find anyway).
To clarify—for readers and adversarial journalists—I still have the rule of “I don’t post anything I wouldn’t want to see my name attached to in public” (and think others should too), but that’s a more general rule, not just for the Forum.
(c)- I’m sure that it isn’t the optimum Forum week. However (1) I do think this topic is important and potentially action-relevant—there is increasing focus on ‘AI Safety’, but AI Safety is a possibly vast field with a range of challenges that a career or funding could address, and the topic of this debate is potentially an important distinction to have a take on when you are making those decisions. And (2) I’m pretty bullish on forum events, and I’d like to run more, and get the community involved more, so any suggestions for future events are always welcome.

Toby Tremlett🔹Mar 20, 2025, 1:51 PM
7 points
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in reply to: Maxime Riché 🔸’s comment on: Discussion Thread: Existential Choices Debate Week
I think yes and for all the reasons. I’m a bit sceptical that we can change the values ASIs will have—we don’t understand present models that well, and there are good reasons not to treat how a model outputs text as representative of its goals (it could be hallucinating, it could be deceptive, it’s outputs might just not be isomorphic to a reward structure).

And even if we could, I don’t know of any non-controversial value to instill in the ASI, that isn’t just included in basic attempts to control the ASI (which I’d be doing mostly for extinction related reasons).

Toby Tremlett🔹Mar 19, 2025, 9:46 AM
2 points
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on: The Value of a Statistical Life is not a good metric
I’ve had drafts of this take lying around for years—really glad to see it out in the open!
I’d love to hear pushback from anyone who thinks it is still valuable.

Toby Tremlett🔹Mar 18, 2025, 10:45 AM
8 points
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in reply to: jackva’s comment on: jackva’s Quick takes
I think this is a fair point—but it’s not the frame I’ve been using to consider debate week topics.
My aim has been to generate useful discussion within the effective altruism community. I’d like to choose topics which nudge people to examine assumptions they’ve been making, and might lead to them changing their minds, and perhaps their priorities, or the focus of their work. I haven’t been thinking about debate weeks as a piece of communications work/ as a way of reaching out to a broader audience. This question in particular was chosen because the Forum audience wouldn’t necessarily have cached takes on it—an audience outside the Forum would need a lot of context to get what we are talking about.

Perhaps I’m missing something though—do you think this is more public facing than I’m assuming? To be clear, I know that it is public, but it’s not directed at an outside audience in the way a book or podcast or op-ed might be.
Edit: I’m also uncertain on the claim that “there are few interventions that are predictably differentiated along those lines”—I think Forethought would disagree, and though I’m not sure I agree with them, they’ve thought about it more than I have.

Toby Tremlett🔹Mar 18, 2025, 10:17 AM
11 points
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in reply to: Christopher Clay’s comment on: Existential Choices Symposium with Will MacAskill and other special guests (3-5pm GMT Monday)
Yeah I’ve always been a bit sceptical of this as well. Surely it’s just a yardstick that a department uses to decide between which investments it should make, rather than a considered (or even descriptive) “value of a life” for the US Government.
Descriptively—the US government would spend far more for a few lives if those lives were hostages of a foreign adversary, and probably has far less willingness to pay for cheap ways the US govt could save lives (idk what these are, probably there are examples in public health).
Basically—I don’t think it’s a number that can be meaningfully extrapolated to figure out the value of avoiding extinction or catastrophe, because the number was designed with far smaller trade-offs in mind, and doesn’t really make sense outside of its intended purpose.

Toby Tremlett🔹Mar 18, 2025, 9:48 AM
4 points
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in reply to: WilliamKiely’s comment on: Discussion Thread: Existential Choices Debate Week
Thanks—yep I think this is becoming a bit of an issue (it came up a couple times in the symposium as well). I might edit the footnote to clarify—worlds with morally valuable digital minds should be included as a non-extinction scenario, but worlds where an AI which could be called “intelligent life” but isn’t conscious/ morally valuable takes over and humans become extinct should count as an extinction scenario.