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 77
Comments317
Topic contributions64
EAs continue to approach new causes (to us) with beginners mind, and I'm continually motivated by it. Some examples:
- ARMoR's great work on anti-microbial resistance.
- This group of volunteers approaching screwworms from an animal welfare point of view.
- (the last example in the three has now slipped my mind; this list is incomplete, you can help by expanding it)
These ideas are new, and they could always fail, or encounter some roadblock which causes those involved to switch to other paths to impact. But I love that EA continues to inspire people to look at the world's problems afresh, and find new ways to solve them. Keep going!
The cost of transfer fees for remittances (specifically money sent back by migrants to their home country) has fallen from around 8% on average in 2011 to around 6% on average today. That means billions more for people on low incomes around the world. Pretty cool.
A couple of scattered thoughts:
- The career advisor/ university advisor I had at school was very unambitious, and it's really cool that you're thinking in this way! However, as others have said, don't worry too much about A Level choice. Your choice of A levels won't define your life.
- I don't think it's a particularly strong sign of anything that you aren't passionate about a particular path now. I only found out that I deeply enjoyed and cared about philosophy after I left school - many great subjects aren't taught in exciting ways.
- I'd probably suggest keeping numeracy (via maths, or failing that, a science or economics) as part of your roster if you can - from my and my friends' experiences, it does seem to be one of the doors that you can actually close at the A level stage. (I'm actually considering doing a Maths A Level or something equivalent at age 25 because I think numeracy is an area I'm particularly bottlenecked in because of my humanities-focused education).
- Good luck on your GCSEs!
Love this post Sarah, and I'm excited to work more on Forum community building this year.
To add a bit to the "Message Toby with ideas for authors you would like to see writing here" CTA:
Last year, we had some success cross-posting blogs on the Forum - for example, Lewis Bollard's Farm Animal Welfare Newsletter, Lauren Gilbert's Lauren Policy, and this post from Oliver Kim's Global Developments blog. Generally, this is a pretty ad hoc decision - a member of our team spots a great post or finds a great blog through Twitter or Substack, and then we message the author to ask if we can crosspost. I'd previously been concerned that doing too much of this might lead to a Forum with more great content, but less great conversations, especially if the authors didn't engage with the comments. So far, the results have been quite different, with authors being more keen to engage with the comments than I'd expected, and good conversations often occurring even if they don't.
I often talk to people who use the Forum but don't see enough discussion of the particular cause they are most interested in. EA is a broad tent, and the Forum will always reflect that, but the best version of the Forum would contain vibrant sub-communities for each of the key causes. You can help make this happen by keeping the Forum in mind when you are reading substack/twitter/other sources of bloggy content. If you find someone who is writing interesting content which would work as a Forum post, let me know! I can handle the reaching out/ consent to post/ automation of crossposting on your behalf.
To clarify, this isn't exactly a service I'm offering (I'll take suggestions as suggestions), and you are always very welcome to just linkpost a great post rather than going through me. But I don't have blog omniscience, even though I write the EA Newsletter, and there is a lot of content on the internet that would be a great addition to the discussion of particular cause areas on the Forum, but wouldn't initially register as interesting to me.
From the rest of the comments, it looks as if I misunderstood this line: "The judges have ruled in favour on our main argument - that the law says that animals should not be kept in the UK if it means they will suffer because of how they have been bred. This is a huge moment for animals in the UK." I.e., it looks as if it should be rephrased to "solely because of how they have been bred", still a good thing, but not the home run I was hoping for.
I really appreciated clarification from @JBentham (this is particularly helpful), and the pushback on the content of the post from @Habryka, @VettedCauses and others!
The RSPCA is holding a "big conversation", culminating in a citizens' assembly. If you have opinions about how animals in the UK are treated (which you probably do), you can contribute your takes here.
A lot of the contributions are very low quality, so I think EA voices have a good chance of standing out and having their opinions shared with a broader audience.