How many of these concerns remain if the Forum's "norm" is to use a non-photographic image?

This lets you have a bit more color/warmth without bringing anyone's "looks" into play. And it gives people a bit more ability to express personality without worrying about what people think of their haircut/clothes/vibe.

I ask because it's my strong preference not to use photos of myself in digital settings unless I'm forced to do so, but I enjoy non-photographic profile images in the context of e.g. Twitter, Reddit, and Goodreads.

Of course, we'd probably end up with a site where some people use photos and others don't, but I think this is a much better arrangement than "everyone is encouraged to use photos".

(In a practical sense, some of the people who have told me the Forum feels a bit cold and unwelcoming to them are people whose contributions seem extremely valuable to me, though of course that doesn't say much about the average value of a counterfactual contribution from any given person who spends more time here because it feels warmer.)

You don't see profile pictures on journal articles, or court documents, or computer code.

Profile pictures are common on Github, but that's pedantic; I acknowledge your larger point.

More to the point, a lot of the places where journal articles and the like actually reach bigger audiences in communities like ours — blog comments, Twitter — use profile pictures. Do you think "academic Twitter" and Substack and the old SSC comment section would be/would have been better without profile pictures? (I don't have a strong intuition either way, as I always process profile photos in those contexts as "fun decoration" rather than "social relationships".)

Hi Larks, thanks for taking the time to comment. I think your continuum comment is a good contribution to the considerations. I’m going to run with that metaphor, and talk about where I think we should fall. I take this seriously and want to get this right.

I’ve drawn three possible lines for what utility the Forum will get from its position on the continuum. Maybe it’s not actually useful, maybe I just like drawing things. I guess my main point is that we don’t have to figure out the entire space, just the local one:

Anyway, the story for the (locally) impersonal position is that adding profile images causes people to pay less attention to the object-level content, and more attention to the person writing. Given that epistemics are one of the top priorities of the Forum, and of EA community building writ-large, this would be quite bad. A substantial sacrifice in our group epistemics would overwhelm nearly all other considerations. I think the crux for me is how large would that effect be?

The story for the social position is that the Forum needs to be an attractive place to comment in order to be used. The Forum is growing now, but many people new to the community don’t use it. Many people experienced in EA read and occasionally comment, but the percentage of the most promising young or new people to the community on the Forum is not what I’d like. When I talk to people about it, they often say that it feels intimidating / unfriendly / cold. Having a broader reach, and broader participation, will increase the Forum’s impact. A crux related to this story is how large an effect this is. Maybe the people talking to me wouldn’t actually join the Forum anyway. It’s fairly long-form discussion, and that’s not for everyone.

—

A digression into my model of the Forum’s impact: In How we think about the Forum (by now 2 years old and not entirely up-to-date), I wrote down the following methods of impact from the Forum:

• Sharing of existing ideas
  • Including making common knowledge
• Development and refinement of new ideas
• Talent discovery
• Public accountability
• Spreading of norms
• Encouraging coordination

To my mind, the path to impact that most favors the impersonal position is the second, “Development and refinement of new ideas”. Even small hits to epistemics are incredibly costly when the whole thing you’re trying to do is figure out what’s true. However the Forum does not only try to figure out what’s true. To my mind the biggest effect on the community's epistemics (and as a whole) comes from spreading our norms to newcomers to the community. This is less valuable (or even negatively valuable) if our epistemics get less good, but it is also impossible if newcomers don’t read the Forum in the first place. All of the items on that list are dependent on more people reading and writing on the Forum.

—

Overall I’m not sure what my position is right now. I’ll need to think and discuss it some more. It’s plausible that there are other important features with less sign uncertainty that become more important in my mind, but I don’t want to shy away from potentially high-impact features either. I’d be appreciative of other people’s impressions of how large the effects of my cruxes are.

—

Some considerations that don’t fall neatly into the continuum analysis:

• We can probably mitigate the amount that epistemics are hurt by having a “profile images off in megathreads” policy. So that when people start digging into things in posts like the Hinge of History post or emotionally-charged topics, the epistemics can stay relatively unaffected. (This probably doesn’t matter until we put profile images on comments.)
• Newbies to the community see a lot of names. Images are generally more recognizable, which can help newbies get a sense of which authors they like. This helps them get drawn in to reading more, and understanding the dynamics of the various positions held by various authors, in the same way that you or I can do because we recognize their names. (“That’s Buck arguing for position X, this makes sense because I’ve already read him supporting similar position Y”) This is I believe related to your “statistical discrimination” comment.

But to the extent these come at the cost of rational discussion, this is a cost we should be happy to pay.

What do you think the effect size is of adding pictures? My guess is that it's pretty small.

For example, the "beauty premium" in employment compensation is usually considered to be small (<10%),^[1] and I would expect that to be much larger than the effect of profile pictures on a forum, because a) how your coworkers look is much more salient than how some commenter with a tiny picture looks, and b) beauty is more plausibly correlated with productivity in certain jobs (e.g. sales) than it is with forum post quality.

I agree with this, particularly since I feel the same way about where the Forum lies on the spectrum.

Even though I sometimes wish the Forum felt more welcoming, I do think this kind of change feels incongruent with the way the Forum currently presents itself and so am not in favor. Of course, whether the Forum wants to stay where it is on the continuum is a separate discussion!

"You don't see profile pictures on journal articles, or court documents, or computer code."

Makes me wonder what you think journal articles and court documents are optimised for... :P I don't think we should take hints from systems that are optimised for something other than we are optimising for.

Hi Larks, can you elaborate in what ways profile pictures would make the forum biased, inefficient, and nepotistic? I am failing to see how pictures degrade epistemics or would lead to those things.

I'm not saying looks should matter, but they probably make the conversation easier to follow, make it easier to know/remember who you're talking to, and make the forum friendlier (assuming enough people upload friendly photos).

Edited to add: I responded to some similar points here just now. I could see how photos could make the forum more biased, but I don't see how it would make it inefficient or nepotistic.

I'm guessing you haven't seen, so let me show off the new signup flow!

Oh and longer-term, like a year after the launch of this feature, I think it would be ideal if at least 40% of active Forum authors/commenters at a given time used their own faces, and 60-70% had a non-blank image.