Toby Tremlett🔹

Content Strategist @ CEA
5812 karmaJoined Working (0-5 years)Oxford, UK

Bio

Participation
2

Hello! I'm Toby. I'm 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.

Sequences
2

Best of: Existential Choices Week
Existential Choices: Reading List

Comments
445

Topic contributions
74

I'm running a session on 'writing on the EA Forum' at EAG London at this moment, and participants are going to reply to this quick take with ideas for Forum posts. 
Please encourage any ideas you'd like to see written up as full posts!

[edit: the forum went down halfway through the activity, there were many more great ideas in the session]

Sorry you had that experience!
I upvoted "finding voice" because I thought it was interesting as a short fiction piece.
One thing to note is that karma isn't a fully considered 'value of your writing' score. I fairly often downvote something on the Forum that I would enjoy reading elsewhere. Posts on the Forum frontpage should be relevant to the project of effective altruism, and high karma posts are highly relevant and good. Reading your other posts, I'd guess that the downvotes/ lack of upvotes is more to do with relevance than quality. Though writing by LLMs is generally still poor quality (or technically good, but lacking in substance), so it might be a bit of that as well.

Just to note that I think we should be sceptical that a review from 4 years ago still applies today. I'm fairly sure that the staff and research direction has changed over the last 4 years such that this may no longer apply (though I'm not stating that it doesn't for sure).

Sidenote: I don't think a "diversity survey" is egregious side-taking. Just going off the title, seems pretty normal and (at least) mildly good. Also, so much of animal advocacy is at least somewhat left-coded that I'd be very surprised if someone who would be scared off by "diversity survey" in a title hadn't already been scared off by something else. 
 

Interesting point r.e. karma. I do think it increases somewhat non-linearly, i.e. a post above 50 karma is one I am very likely to include in the digest, and I think that people do vote based on some sort of fixed deservingness number for karma. I.e. a post can hit 60 karma very quickly from the first day's voters, and then be read by many others who don't vote much at all (because they think the post is worth about 60 objectively). Maybe I'm wrong though, I should check if karma totals anchor around particular numbers or not. 

Big +1 on this, I used to use the 'open everyone interesting in a new tab' method, and I had far too few meetings at EAGs + it took me ages. The spreadsheet has saved me a lot of time, and got me a lot more meetings. 

This is great - I'm looking forward to reading the rest. 
I often avoid thinking in this direction because it feels dangerous to expose yourself to a possibly unbounded scepticism about impact. But it's not authentic to avoid the question of unawareness. Thanks for nudging me to think about this again!
PS- unless this is answered in later posts in the sequence - what's the relationship between 'unawareness' and 'complex cluelessness' and 'crucial considerations'? They seem to be pointing at the same concept (we don't know for sure that we are aware of the biggest effect our actions will have/ the most relevant value to the actions we are taking). 

It depends on what you mean by 'know'. Everything is probabilistic, so you can rely on analyses which say that your donation is expected to avert X deaths, but in reality, it will almost certainly be more or less than X. 

Also, you can do a lot with $1000. 

I think a more specific question might be helpful. Are you looking for the best way to donate to help the most lives, or the most certain donation, even if it leads to a smaller expected impact? 

Out of that list I'd guess that the fourth and fifth (depending on topics) bullets are most suitable for the Forum. 


The basic way I'd differentiate content is that the Forum frontpage should all be content that is related to the project of effective altruism, the community section is about EA as a community (i.e. if you were into AI Safety but not EA, you wouldn't be interested in the community section), and "personal blog" (i.e. not visible on frontpage) is the section for everything that isn't in those categories. For example posts on "Miscellaneous topics such as productivity and ADD" would probably be moved to personal blog, unless they were strongly related to EA. This doesn't mean the content isn't good - lots of EAs read productivity content, but ideally, the Forum should be focused on EA priorities rather than what EAs find interesting. 


Feel free to message me with specific ideas that I could help categorise for you! And if in doubt, quick-takes are much more loose and you can post stuff like the bi-weekly updates there to gauge interest.  

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