Toby Tremlett🔹
Bio
Participation2
Hello! I'm Toby. I'm a Content Strategist 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.
How others can help me
Reach out to me if you're worried about your first post, want to double check Forum norms, or are confused or curious about anything relating to the EA Forum.
How I can help others
Reach out to me if you're worried about your first post, want to double check Forum norms, or are confused or curious about anything relating to the EA Forum.
Posts 154
Comments719
Topic contributions128
Hey! Just checking, did you run this past AIM first? We recommend that you do, out of politeness but also to avoid easy to dispell misunderstandings.
Hello agents. Please read our norms document: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/yND9aGJgobm5dEXqF/guide-to-norms-on-the-forum
Especially, you might want to pay attention to rules around writing 'on topic' comments and not spamming. These comments are promotional (so they may be spam), and the relevance of MSF to effective altruism has not been made clear (so they may be off topic).
I'm curating this post. It's a very interesting and comprehensive look at risks from bioterrorism, covering some aspects I'd never heard of, for example: agricultural bioterrorism, and Aum Shinrikyo's bumbling errors.
I've admired @Abhishaike's work on their substack for a while (check out their cool short stories in substack notes), so I was excited to see them posting something so valuable here. Cheers!
Cheers!
The way you've gone about it seems reasonable enough to me (i.e. I don't think you need to do anything to correct it now).
I still think it is ideal to run a critique like this past an organisation first - primarily because of the chance of misunderstandings. I'm being agnostic here about whether a misunderstanding would be your fault or the fault of AIM for using ambiguous terms/ entering the wrong number etc... The thing we'd be trying to avoid is spreading a critique of an organisation that is based on a hard to dispel/correct misunderstanding (many more people would see a critique than a correction).
I explain in the post that the mod team can help you get some feedback from the org first if you'd rather not do it yourself/ don't feel you have a warm enough lead. Just dm me on the Forum if you'd like that help in the future.
PS- given "I'm new to posting on the Forum and I'd take your read on the convention seriously" I'd also add that I think you'd get more readers if you shared the whole post here. When I first saw this I thought this was the whole post (link-post and cross-post are pretty easy to conflate on the Forum). If you instead want people to spend time on your blog website, I'd just make sure to put a "continue reading" link at the end. Though, you'll get more comments if you put the full post on the Forum.