I’m curious about your vision for what better search results would look like. I’m not sure how the current search works, but I expect that it prioritizes title-matching, so that the phrase “Effective Altruism” returns posts whose titles begin with that phrase (which isn’t very common, as most people here abbreviate it “EA”).
Would your preferred results look like any of the following?
The highest-karma posts using the phrase “effective altruism” anywhere (title or text)
The newest posts using the phrase “effective altruism” anywhere (title or text)
The posts using the phrase “effective altruism” most often (between title and text)
Keyword search seems like a pretty good way to find “that one post you’re looking for”, but I could imagine that karma/newness should be factors if people are using Forum search to hunt down “interesting posts about topic X”. I don’t know how common each use case is.
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Regarding screenshots: Images can’t be added to comments (correction: they can, see here); is that what you were trying to find a workaround for? (If so, it’s useful feedback for us that this is something people want.)
You can add an image to a post by leaving a blank line where you want the image to go. Then, highlight a space in the blank line. You’ll see a bar pop up with options like “bold” and “italic”.
Click the image of a photo on that bar, and you’ll be able to add the URL where your image is hosted. The Forum doesn’t support attachments, but there are a lot of sites where you can upload an image for free. My favorite is imgbb.
Re: pictures, ability to do pictures in comments would be nice. But my frustration was really around this:
Click the image of a photo on that bar, and you’ll be able to add the URL where your image is hosted. The Forum doesn’t support attachments, but there are a lot of sites where you can upload an image for free. My favorite is imgbb.
This is a real pain, and a disincentive to using charts or tables. I write in google docs for a variety of reasons, including because it’s easy to get feedback from people. So once I’ve written a draft, edited, sent it out for feedback, revised it, given it a final edit, and at long last have it looking the way I want in a format that’s used around the world, I don’t want to have to upload a bunch of images to some site I’m unfamiliar with, then insert each of them into the post.
I’d like to do be able to do a simple copy/paste. Inserting attachments would still be frustrating, but a significant improvement on the status quo. In either case, I’d like there to be clear and easily accessible instructions (people shouldn’t have to figure out the imgbb solution on their own). Hope this clarifies where the frustration stems from, let me know if you still have questions.
Re: search, “effective altruism” was probably a bad example but I guess I’d like to see that return something like CEA’s guiding principles (or whatever the old search version did). “Bednet” is probably a better example. You’d expect this to turn up something about bednets and/or AMF. Instead, it returns three results that mention bednets but are in no way about them.
1. Charity Entrepreneurship Research Summary (22 karma, 3 years old)
2. The age distribution of GiveWell’s charities (13 karma, 4 years old)
3. What consequences? (25 karma, 2 years old)
Interestingly, searching for “bednets” instead of “bednet” yields very different results:
1. 8 ways to free up donation money without sacrifice
2. Where should anti-paternalists donate?
3. Kidney donation is a reasonable choice for effective altruists and more should consider it.
I’m not sure exactly what my algorithm would be, I imagine it’d involve keyword matching in the title, in the text, karma, recentness, etc. Let’s say someone wanted to find “After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organization”, which I believe is the highest karma post in forum history. And it has a title that you can’t expect people to remember. I’d definitely want that to be the top result if someone searched for “jobs” (it’s the 7th result, requiring an extra click to see) or “ea job market” (doesn’t show up).
Images can’t be added to comments; is that what you were trying to find a workaround for?
It’s possible to add images to comments by selecting and copying them from anywhere public (note that it doesn’t work if you right click and choose ‘copy image’). In this thread, I do it in this comment.
I see how I can’t do it manually, though, by selecting text. I wouldn’t expect it to be too difficult to add that possibility, though, given that it’s already possible in another way?
On LessWrong we intentionally didn’t want to encourage pictures in the comments, since that provides a way to hijack people’s attention in a way that seemed too easy. You can use markdown syntax to add pictures, both in the markdown editor and the WYSIWYG editor.
I’m curious about your vision for what better search results would look like. I’m not sure how the current search works, but I expect that it prioritizes title-matching, so that the phrase “Effective Altruism” returns posts whose titles begin with that phrase (which isn’t very common, as most people here abbreviate it “EA”).
Would your preferred results look like any of the following?
The highest-karma posts using the phrase “effective altruism” anywhere (title or text)
The newest posts using the phrase “effective altruism” anywhere (title or text)
The posts using the phrase “effective altruism” most often (between title and text)
Keyword search seems like a pretty good way to find “that one post you’re looking for”, but I could imagine that karma/newness should be factors if people are using Forum search to hunt down “interesting posts about topic X”. I don’t know how common each use case is.
----
Regarding screenshots: Images can’t be added to comments (correction: they can, see here); is that what you were trying to find a workaround for? (If so, it’s useful feedback for us that this is something people want.)
You can add an image to a post by leaving a blank line where you want the image to go. Then, highlight a space in the blank line. You’ll see a bar pop up with options like “bold” and “italic”.
Click the image of a photo on that bar, and you’ll be able to add the URL where your image is hosted. The Forum doesn’t support attachments, but there are a lot of sites where you can upload an image for free. My favorite is imgbb.
Re: pictures, ability to do pictures in comments would be nice. But my frustration was really around this:
This is a real pain, and a disincentive to using charts or tables. I write in google docs for a variety of reasons, including because it’s easy to get feedback from people. So once I’ve written a draft, edited, sent it out for feedback, revised it, given it a final edit, and at long last have it looking the way I want in a format that’s used around the world, I don’t want to have to upload a bunch of images to some site I’m unfamiliar with, then insert each of them into the post.
I’d like to do be able to do a simple copy/paste. Inserting attachments would still be frustrating, but a significant improvement on the status quo. In either case, I’d like there to be clear and easily accessible instructions (people shouldn’t have to figure out the imgbb solution on their own). Hope this clarifies where the frustration stems from, let me know if you still have questions.
Re: search, “effective altruism” was probably a bad example but I guess I’d like to see that return something like CEA’s guiding principles (or whatever the old search version did). “Bednet” is probably a better example. You’d expect this to turn up something about bednets and/or AMF. Instead, it returns three results that mention bednets but are in no way about them.
1. Charity Entrepreneurship Research Summary (22 karma, 3 years old)
2. The age distribution of GiveWell’s charities (13 karma, 4 years old)
3. What consequences? (25 karma, 2 years old)
Interestingly, searching for “bednets” instead of “bednet” yields very different results:
1. 8 ways to free up donation money without sacrifice
2. Where should anti-paternalists donate?
3. Kidney donation is a reasonable choice for effective altruists and more should consider it.
I’m not sure exactly what my algorithm would be, I imagine it’d involve keyword matching in the title, in the text, karma, recentness, etc. Let’s say someone wanted to find “After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organization”, which I believe is the highest karma post in forum history. And it has a title that you can’t expect people to remember. I’d definitely want that to be the top result if someone searched for “jobs” (it’s the 7th result, requiring an extra click to see) or “ea job market” (doesn’t show up).
It’s possible to add images to comments by selecting and copying them from anywhere public (note that it doesn’t work if you right click and choose ‘copy image’). In this thread, I do it in this comment.
I see how I can’t do it manually, though, by selecting text. I wouldn’t expect it to be too difficult to add that possibility, though, given that it’s already possible in another way?
On LessWrong we intentionally didn’t want to encourage pictures in the comments, since that provides a way to hijack people’s attention in a way that seemed too easy. You can use markdown syntax to add pictures, both in the markdown editor and the WYSIWYG editor.