A conference I recently attended was extremely helpful to my research. I met several scientific grandaddies of my research topic who started the field out years ago that collectively raised important questions that I had not been considering and subsequently addressed in my work, and drew my attention to longstanding sticking points in the field that I altered my approach towards in order to incontrovertibly put to rest. Meeting these people and others also has given me a number of new contacts working on similar topics that will not ignore cold emails and allowed me to see some of their raw data and validate my techniques.
It gave me a great idea about the state of the art in cell biological techniques and ways our lab could improve.
It also introduced me to a number of widely-flung ideas that I would not have considered on my own which I have been following A - out of interest for my own research, B - for purposes of thinking about changing tracks after I graduate, and C - out of personal fascination for the topics.
Thanks. It is important to hear from people who, you know, actually go to conferences.
I'm asking this as a follow-up to http://lesswrong.com/lw/d5y/why_academic_papers_are_a_terrible_discussion/, which was written a few years ago, and which I find very interesting.
Many of the arguments advanced in http://lesswrong.com/lw/d5y/why_academic_papers_are_a_terrible_discussion/ (especially inaccessibility) could just as well apply to conferences, too.
I'd also wonder - would you consider conferences to also be a terrible discussion forum? What do you think would be some good alternatives?
The audience for conferences is limited, and people seem to remember only a tiny tiny fraction of everything they've encountered in a conference. The ideas in conferences don't seem to do much for building up platforms of public discussions around the new subjects that are often announced in conferences (rather than, say, on online platforms).
I suppose one could advance the argument that ideas often get brought up/discussed at conferences that wouldn't be conveniently discussed in any other medium (for now..). But is this mostly because people are too comfortable with what they're been brought up with?