Toby Tremlett🔹

Karma: 9,901

Hello! I’m Toby. I’m the EA Forum Product Lead at CEA. I’m responsible for the EA Forum’s success.

You’ll see me posting a lot, authoring the EA Newsletter and curating Forum Digests, making moderator comments and decisions, and more. I’m the person to reach out to with feature requests, complaints, suggestions, etc...

Outside of work, I’m hosting a podcast with my friend Frances: The World Can Be Better, and writing blogposts on anything I feel like.

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. I also helped run the Amplify Creative Grants program, to encourage more impactful podcasting and YouTube projects (the biggest success of the program was ‘How I learned to love shrimp’).

Toby Tremlett🔹 11 Aug 2026 13:42 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Hazem🔸’s comment on: Hazem Hassan ’s Quick takes
Interesting! Kind of odd to see the peak being Wednesday (the day I write and send the digest) because posts posted on Wednesday will necessarily have the lowest karma relative to their final amount, and I start off with a list of all posts sorted by karma. Recommended matters most because the rest of the digest is for announcements etc… which are featured when relevant regardless of karma.

Toby Tremlett🔹 30 Jul 2026 9:45 UTC
10 points
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on: Never born, then maybe died twice
I’m curating this post.
Being aware of and grateful for privilege, and wanting to pass on our luck, has always been an important moral strain in effective altruism (just look at GWWC’s live pledge motivations). This post is a great example of it^[1].
Thanks for posting Nick!
1. ^
  I also value the exploration of the reverse—the guilt at not using privilege when you could.

Toby Tremlett🔹 30 Jul 2026 8:13 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: RohanSR🔸’s comment on: The Featured Page
Yep :)
this would resolve the issue
It’s live!

Toby Tremlett🔹 29 Jul 2026 14:39 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: The Featured Page
@RohanSR🔸 does this resolve the design issue? Or are there other elements that you’re not a fan of as it stands?

Toby Tremlett🔹 29 Jul 2026 8:47 UTC
11 points
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in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: The Featured Page
Thanks Nick, good flags.
I’m skeptical of this criteria ‘Selected posts to help us answer: how can we do the most good with our resources?’ For a start why not use the better-polling “selected posts that help us do more good”, which also helps with consistent CEA messaging
Mostly because I think that that’s a broader category, and I want to keep this one bounded.
These posts below for example are amazing (including classic posts), but don’t necessarily meet that criteria
I’ll give quick takes on each without rereading them (these are great examples, thanks!):
1. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wTXAbzbkAxZrLv5Cg/why-are-longtermists-so-much-less-focused-on-human
  1. This would be included. I didn’t include it in this draft of the post, but ‘cause prioritisation’ is almost always featurable (if it is good). I want the Forum to be the place to find cause prio discussion.
2. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/XuNBJL3EHqhFKLEGn/impact-requires-implementation-what-dispensers-for-safe
  1. I’m guessing this would also be included, it’s highlighting a general lesson for impartial altruists involved in global health.
3. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CmGPp5p9RvTLuuzbt/aim-high-even-if-you-fall-short
  1. I probably wouldn’t feature this. I love Julia’s motivational/pastoral posts and I think they deserve a lot of readers, but they are firmly in the community/ motivational category. I’m excluding that category because I want to encourage more cause prioritisation work in particular, and also because my current best guess is that people will still read this content even if it is less promoted on the Forum. I’ll be monitoring that—it’d be a real loss if posts like this ended up getting no readers.
  2. I should probably explicitly say something about motivational posts in the criteria. I’ll include it in the next draft.
4. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/FpjQMYQmS3rWewZ83/effective-altruism-is-a-question-not-an-ideology
  1. This likely wouldn’t be included because, although it names an important idea for effective altruists, I can’t see the path by which it influences the deployment of resources. This is without a reread though—if it is more about how to market EA than I remember then it might be featurable.
  2. This is also a case where it would end up on the featured page anyway, because it would get over 100 karma.
5. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MGTzcHtwxpL6iXLJd/if-far-uv-is-so-great-why-isn-t-it-everywhere
  1. This would be included. Without rereading it it seems clearly to be an argument that something needs more/ less resources.
I like these examples because they make clear some of the real trade-offs here, thanks for putting them together! Feel free to push me on this further, this is just a quick comment.

Toby Tremlett🔹 28 Jul 2026 15:15 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: The Featured Page
Couldn’t resist and claude coded it—list view is in code review now.

Toby Tremlett🔹 28 Jul 2026 13:01 UTC
2 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: RohanSR🔸’s comment on: The Featured Page
Thanks!
Yep for V2 I’m already planning to allow for a more front-pagey looking option with no images, and just posts layed out in a list. Hopefully that’ll address the information density point (let me know it if doesn’t).
And on the screenshot, I agree, those look weird, I’ll make some tweaks.

Toby Tremlett🔹 27 Jul 2026 15:24 UTC
2 points
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on: Moving on from the EA Forum
Thank you Sarah!
You’ve been a great manager and leader of our team.
I’m more excited and hopeful about the future of the Forum now than I have been for a long time, and that’s because of the support within CEA that you drummed up for us, and the strategy that you helped create. I’ve grown a lot with your help, and I’m glad to now have an inner anti-authoritarian Sarah that I can call on whenever I’m tempted to defer.
Thanks for everything, and best of luck at 80K :)

Toby Tremlett🔹 27 Jul 2026 12:08 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: damc4’s comment on: New EA Forum LLM-use policy
It’s not an assumption. I read a lot of AI generated text, including on the EA Forum, and so far, it’s low quality.

Toby Tremlett🔹 27 Jul 2026 10:11 UTC
6 points
2 ∶ 0
on: What should the EA community be doing now that the (AIS) Overton window has opened up again?
+1 on Overton window, this is the first AI development that my Mum had heard of, and a non-EA friend texted me about.

Toby Tremlett🔹 23 Jul 2026 13:19 UTC
4 points
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on: Hard-to-reverse decisions destroy option value
I’m curating this post from 2017 because:
a) ‘hard to reverse decisions destroy option value’ is a true and useful idea and
b) this problem is relevant again as we consider the multiple ways the EA movement could develop, if Anthropic or OpenAI IPOs do change the funding environment.

Toby Tremlett🔹 23 Jul 2026 8:44 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
on: So you want to start something for animals: a map of the incubators
Thanks Sofia! Not a direct answer to your post, but this is a good example of why I’m not currently planning on downranking AI-written posts. This post is a great resource, and the fact that it’s AI-assisted doesn’t really affect the value.

Toby Tremlett🔹 22 Jul 2026 9:45 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: James Herbert’s comment on: tobytrem’s Quick takes
Absolutely! Those are most of my questions, but I don’t think I have one about relative priority (i.e. are community-building teams spending too much/ enough/ not enough of their effort on marketing). I’ll add something.

Toby Tremlett🔹 21 Jul 2026 19:18 UTC
15 points
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on: tobytrem’s Quick takes
Me and @Fran are interviewing @GraceAdams🔸 tomorrow evening. Is there anything you’d like us to ask her?

Toby Tremlett🔹 20 Jul 2026 13:21 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: John Salter’s comment on: MalcolmMcLeod’s Quick Takes
Such as, for example, the Effective Altruism Forum :)

Toby Tremlett🔹 16 Jul 2026 10:43 UTC
5 points
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on: Counting animals: Stable population size is not equivalent to priority level
I’m curating this post.
Firstly because it makes a useful and well backed up point—that stable population estimates are a misleading input into your analyses.
Secondly because: We often extoll the values of pretty shallow fermi-estimate style analyses. This post is a helpful counter-weight against the BOTEC blasé: some inputs are uncertain enough that we should (a) investigate them further, even for a quick BOTEC and/or (b) remember that the output of our analyses could change radically based on tweaking a few assumptions.

Thanks Abraham and Mal!

Toby Tremlett🔹 16 Jul 2026 9:02 UTC
9 points
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on: tobytrem’s Quick takes
Just under a month until the Cluelessness Critiques Competition deadline. How’s it going? Any hints on what people are writing about?

Toby Tremlett🔹 13 Jul 2026 8:24 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: huw’s comment on: MacKenzie Scott’s $26 billion, in QALYs: an interactive, evidence-weighted CEA
Actually, we don’t downrank them, we just auto-tag them as AI-generated (although this one hasn’t run automatically- doh)

Toby Tremlett🔹 10 Jul 2026 22:23 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: tobytrem’s Quick takes
She had to delay so it’s not too late, but I already included that exact question :)

Toby Tremlett🔹 10 Jul 2026 9:52 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: tobytrem’s Quick takes
I’m recording a podcast (TWCBB) with @Lauren Gilbert [edit: we had to reschedule so I can still collect questions]. If there’s anything you’d like us to ask her, comment here.