Toby Tremlett🔹

Open thread: 2025 Q4 (Oc­to­ber—De­cem­ber)

• Toby Tremlett🔹Sep 30, 2025, 7:57 AM

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  in reply to: Mikolaj Kniejski’s comment on: Miko­laj Kniejski’s Quick takes

  I’d bet that productivity posts will have more engagement on lesswrong, but apart from that I’d bet with you.

What posts are you think­ing about writ­ing?

What posts would you like some­one to write?

An­nounc­ing: Draft Amnesty Week Oc­to­ber 13-19

• Toby Tremlett🔹Sep 24, 2025, 9:00 AM

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  on: to­bytrem’s Quick takes

  Mini EA Forum Update

  You can now save comments, as well as posts, to your Saved & read page.

  If you want to save a comment, just click the three dots on the top right of a comment, select save, and you’ll find the comment at the bottom of your Saved & read page.

  

  Thanks to the LessWrong team for adding this to the codebase!

• Toby Tremlett🔹Sep 24, 2025, 7:34 AM

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  in reply to: Anthony DiGiovanni’s comment on: to­bytrem’s Quick takes

  Hey Anthony. Very reasonable question! Replying at length to a sub-section from one of the essays would definitely constitute deep engagement. The second idea is less obviously related to the collection, but I did say that you could write on a ‘theme from across the collection’ so it would likely qualify. If you want to be extra sure I’m happy to look at a plan or something.

  The motivation with the quick take is mostly to underline that this isn’t an essay competition about longtermism, it’s an essay competition about a specific book about longtermism. You clealry get that, so I’m not concerned :)

Septem­ber ’25 EA Newslet­ter poll: Strong Longtermism

• Toby Tremlett🔹Sep 16, 2025, 3:42 PM

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  in reply to: Anthony DiGiovanni’s comment on: an­ti­monyan­thony’s Shortform

  The “arbitrariness” of precise EVs is just a matter of our discomfort with picking a precise number (see above).

  I understand my vote to be consistent with us never in fact reaching ‘principled’ precise EV numbers though.

• Toby Tremlett🔹Sep 16, 2025, 8:41 AM

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  on: We mapped the EA Fo­rum’s in­tel­lec­tual land­scape—read about epistemic qual­ity anal­y­sis, fo­rum vibes, au­thor net­works, and a new writ­ing tool we developed

  So much great stuff in here! I was thinking about some sort of LLM-based epistemic quality metric last week—really convenient for you guys to just make one! I’ll be in touch when I have more question, thanks for doing this :)

• Toby Tremlett🔹Sep 16, 2025, 8:29 AM

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  on: to­bytrem’s Quick takes

  I’ve added this sentence to the top-level description of the Essays on Longtermism competition: “Your essay must show deep engagement with the book, or one particular chapter”
  
  I’ve seen a few early submissions which don’t seem particularly related to the contents of the book. This is to be expected, but I wanted to make this extra clear just in case someone was putting serious time into an essay which is an ‘essay on longtermism’ but isn’t responding to ‘Essays on Longtermism’.
  
  As described in the announcement post—I’ll only send plausible winners along to our judging panel.

• Toby Tremlett🔹Sep 15, 2025, 2:47 PM

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  in reply to: MaddoxFlame’s comment on: Open thread: July—Septem­ber 2025

  Hello!

• Toby Tremlett🔹Sep 15, 2025, 2:47 PM

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  in reply to: Antje Stüven ’s comment on: Open thread: July—Septem­ber 2025

  Welcome Antje!
  I work on the EA Forum team, so feel free to ask me questions whenever—about EA or the Forum,
  Cheers,
  Toby
  

• Toby Tremlett🔹Sep 15, 2025, 2:23 PM

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  in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Indi­rect effects in longtermism

  Strongly agree!

EA Or­ga­ni­za­tion Up­dates: Septem­ber 2025

• Toby Tremlett🔹Sep 12, 2025, 4:04 PM

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  in reply to: Midtermist12’s comment on: Midter­mist12′s Quick takes

  I think this particular quick take would have benefitted from being shorter—for example just the first two paragraphs get across your main point. Maybe another sentence to represent the corollary point about chilling effects for other AI users. I don’t mean all posts should be bulletpoints, just that I often see AI written content which was clearly generated based on a few bulletpoints worth of info, and would have been better off remaining as such (not sure your post was in that category, it was well received as it was).
  
  I’d always recommend custom prompting your AI, it does a lot to make the tone more sensible, and can work well to force it to be concise especially.
  
  BTW- The current rough plan is not to ban AI content and indeed to evaluate it based on its merits. I’m mostly wondering what to do about the middle ground content which is valuable, but a bit too taxing for the reader purely because it is written by AI.

• Toby Tremlett🔹Sep 12, 2025, 3:45 PM

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  in reply to: Midtermist12’s comment on: Midter­mist12′s Quick takes

  I’m drafting new rules and norms around AI usage at the moment. It’s especially difficult because of this critique—i.e. AI can genuinely help people express ideas when they otherwise wouldn’t have the time.
  
  However, there is an effect where clearly AI generated text causes me (and other readers) to stop reading because the majority of AI generated text on the internet is low quality/​ overlong/​ contains too few ideas/​ etc…
  
  You can get around this by removing clear signs of AI writing (for example, condense this page and put it in your system prompt), or rewriting the AI’s writing in your own words (when I write the EA Newsletter, I often write a bad draft, get AI to rewrite it, and then rewrite it again myself, using some good elements from the AI version).
  
  The bottom line for me is that if a post is good quality and contains valuable ideas, it doesn’t matter who (or what) wrote it. But many AI-written posts (especially ones written without custom stylistic prompts) would (currently) be better off as a series of bullet-points written by the prompter, not the AI.
  
  

• Toby Tremlett🔹Sep 12, 2025, 2:38 PM

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  in reply to: Martin Percy’s comment on: Open thread: July—Septem­ber 2025

  Great! No worries :)

• Toby Tremlett🔹Sep 12, 2025, 1:01 PM

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  in reply to: Martin Percy’s comment on: Open thread: July—Septem­ber 2025

  Hey Martin,
  Welcome to the Forum!
  I wonder if you’ve connected with @Keiran Harris 🔸 ? As far as I know he is working on “using AI-generated video to make short sci-fi films showing what an AI dystopia could look like” right now.
  Let me know if you have any other questions about EA or the Forum, happy to chat (here or in dm).
  Cheers,
  Toby (Content Strategist for the EA Forum)

• Toby Tremlett🔹Sep 9, 2025, 1:20 PM

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  in reply to: Katalina Hernandez’s comment on: Katal­ina Her­nan­dez’s Quick takes

  One thing is that emojis are pretty rare on the Forum (despite being popular in places like LinkedIn and some slacks), so they sometimes make things appear more salesy/​ even LLM generated.
  In my opinion, your text itself doesn’t seem to salesy or overly persuasive.