Toby Tremlett🔹
Bio
Participation2
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.
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 54
Comments224
Topic contributions52
This might seem obvious, but I'd love someone to write about the most promising global health interventions. Specifically, I don't know what kind of things we could achieve with $100m which would be better than just $100m to GiveWell's top charities. (For example, maybe some of these technologies could be created for $100m).
That's fair enough Leo! It's definitely not just you. But if that was my only goal, I'd probably run a survey rather than a debate week. During this week we are hoping to see conversations which change minds, which means juggling a few goals.
Maybe in the future (no promises) we will introduce polls or debate sliders to add in posts, and then we could get more niche and precise data.
I'd love to see some analysis of the current cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns. I've seen some takes on the Forum (for example here) that raise concerns about corporate campaigns, but I haven't seen a substantive investigation. Depending on how it goes, it might change my vote next week.
Thanks Leo! I remember your comment from last time, it's a fair point.
We did consider framing the question exactly like that (i.e. splitting 100m between the two), but I decided against it. The main reason was that a vote would actually seem to project far more certainty if you had to give a precise number than with this question, which might introduce a far higher barrier to voting. The reason we have voting in a debate week is not to produce a perfectly accurate aggregation of everyone's opinion (though, all else equal, a more accurate aggregation is better), but rather to encourage and enable valuable conversation on crucial questions. So a question that is framed in a way which still makes sense and represents a preference, but will get more votes, is probably a better one.
I do understand that the meaning of a vote is ambiguous, but this is why we are introducing commenting, so you can explain the reason behind your vote. Hopefully, this means that ambiguities like the one you mention won't matter too much.
Yep- there is a trade-off in the sense that the money will go to one, and the other will miss out. I wasn't very clear in my previous comment- sorry!
What I meant is that we ideally aren't pitting human and animal welfare against each other. Most arguments, I expect, will be claiming that giving the money in one direction will increase welfare overall. In fact, this increase in welfare will accrue to either animals or humans, but the question was never "which is more deserving of welfare", it was "which option will produce the most welfare". Does that make it clearer? It's a subtler point than I thought while making it.
I've just been informed that "global health and wellbeing" actually is intended by OP to include animal welfare- so I'm disagree-reacting the above comment.
Exactly- I was also thinking of "global wellbeing" but then realised that would also include animals. "Global health and wellbeing" is the name for the cause area in OpenPhilanthropy's terminology which only applies to humans, so I think that would have meaning to some people (although it is easy to overestimate average EA context when you've been around it so long).
Another alternative is to do something like we did on the last debate week, and have definitions of the terms appear when you hover over them in the banner. I'll chat to Will, who is developing the banner, about our options when I see him tomorrow.
Cheers!
That's interesting- I guess I'm expecting so much diversity in responses that one fixed response question would probably raise more questions than it answered (i.e. "which second-order consideration?"). An alternative would be to send out a short survey afterwards to a randomised group of voters from across the spectrum. Depending on the content of people's comments maybe we could also categorise them and do some kind of basic analysis (i.e. without sending a survey out).
The Debate Week banner is under construction... get your takes ready for Monday morning!
In the mean time, you can brush up on the reading list in the announcement post, or respond to this post with ideas for posts you'd like to see next week.