Iâm curious about your vision for what better search results would look like. Iâm not sure how the current search works, but I expect that it prioritizes title-matching, so that the phrase âEffective Altruismâ returns posts whose titles begin with that phrase (which isnât very common, as most people here abbreviate it âEAâ).
Would your preferred results look like any of the following?
The highest-karma posts using the phrase âeffective altruismâ anywhere (title or text)
The newest posts using the phrase âeffective altruismâ anywhere (title or text)
The posts using the phrase âeffective altruismâ most often (between title and text)
Keyword search seems like a pretty good way to find âthat one post youâre looking forâ, but I could imagine that karma/ânewness should be factors if people are using Forum search to hunt down âinteresting posts about topic Xâ. I donât know how common each use case is.
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Regarding screenshots: Images canât be added to comments (correction: they can, see here); is that what you were trying to find a workaround for? (If so, itâs 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. Youâll see a bar pop up with options like âboldâ and âitalicâ.
Click the image of a photo on that bar, and youâll be able to add the URL where your image is hosted. The Forum doesnât 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 youâll be able to add the URL where your image is hosted. The Forum doesnât 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 itâs easy to get feedback from people. So once Iâve 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 thatâs used around the world, I donât want to have to upload a bunch of images to some site Iâm unfamiliar with, then insert each of them into the post.
Iâd like to do be able to do a simple copy/âpaste. Inserting attachments would still be frustrating, but a significant improvement on the status quo. In either case, Iâd like there to be clear and easily accessible instructions (people shouldnât 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, âeffective altruismâ was probably a bad example but I guess Iâd like to see that return something like CEAâs guiding principles (or whatever the old search version did). âBednetâ is probably a better example. Youâd expect this to turn up something about bednets and/âor 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 GiveWellâs charities (13 karma, 4 years old)
3. What consequences? (25 karma, 2 years old)
Interestingly, searching for âbednetsâ instead of âbednetâ 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.
Iâm not sure exactly what my algorithm would be, I imagine itâd involve keyword matching in the title, in the text, karma, recentness, etc. Letâs say someone wanted to find âAfter one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organizationâ, which I believe is the highest karma post in forum history. And it has a title that you canât expect people to remember. Iâd definitely want that to be the top result if someone searched for âjobsâ (itâs the 7th result, requiring an extra click to see) or âea job marketâ (doesnât show up).
Images canât be added to comments; is that what you were trying to find a workaround for?
Itâs possible to add images to comments by selecting and copying them from anywhere public (note that it doesnât work if you right click and choose âcopy imageâ). In this thread, I do it in this comment.
I see how I canât do it manually, though, by selecting text. I wouldnât expect it to be too difficult to add that possibility, though, given that itâs already possible in another way?
On LessWrong we intentionally didnât want to encourage pictures in the comments, since that provides a way to hijack peopleâs 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.
Iâm curious about your vision for what better search results would look like. Iâm not sure how the current search works, but I expect that it prioritizes title-matching, so that the phrase âEffective Altruismâ returns posts whose titles begin with that phrase (which isnât very common, as most people here abbreviate it âEAâ).
Would your preferred results look like any of the following?
The highest-karma posts using the phrase âeffective altruismâ anywhere (title or text)
The newest posts using the phrase âeffective altruismâ anywhere (title or text)
The posts using the phrase âeffective altruismâ most often (between title and text)
Keyword search seems like a pretty good way to find âthat one post youâre looking forâ, but I could imagine that karma/ânewness should be factors if people are using Forum search to hunt down âinteresting posts about topic Xâ. I donât know how common each use case is.
----
Regarding screenshots: Images canât be added to comments (correction: they can, see here); is that what you were trying to find a workaround for? (If so, itâs 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. Youâll see a bar pop up with options like âboldâ and âitalicâ.
Click the image of a photo on that bar, and youâll be able to add the URL where your image is hosted. The Forum doesnât 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 itâs easy to get feedback from people. So once Iâve 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 thatâs used around the world, I donât want to have to upload a bunch of images to some site Iâm unfamiliar with, then insert each of them into the post.
Iâd like to do be able to do a simple copy/âpaste. Inserting attachments would still be frustrating, but a significant improvement on the status quo. In either case, Iâd like there to be clear and easily accessible instructions (people shouldnât 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, âeffective altruismâ was probably a bad example but I guess Iâd like to see that return something like CEAâs guiding principles (or whatever the old search version did). âBednetâ is probably a better example. Youâd expect this to turn up something about bednets and/âor 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 GiveWellâs charities (13 karma, 4 years old)
3. What consequences? (25 karma, 2 years old)
Interestingly, searching for âbednetsâ instead of âbednetâ 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.
Iâm not sure exactly what my algorithm would be, I imagine itâd involve keyword matching in the title, in the text, karma, recentness, etc. Letâs say someone wanted to find âAfter one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organizationâ, which I believe is the highest karma post in forum history. And it has a title that you canât expect people to remember. Iâd definitely want that to be the top result if someone searched for âjobsâ (itâs the 7th result, requiring an extra click to see) or âea job marketâ (doesnât show up).
Itâs possible to add images to comments by selecting and copying them from anywhere public (note that it doesnât work if you right click and choose âcopy imageâ). In this thread, I do it in this comment.
I see how I canât do it manually, though, by selecting text. I wouldnât expect it to be too difficult to add that possibility, though, given that itâs already possible in another way?
On LessWrong we intentionally didnât want to encourage pictures in the comments, since that provides a way to hijack peopleâs 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.