What have we learned from a random LW person opining about things (s)he likely has no experience with?
(With apologies to the OP).
See also: peer review is terrible, frequentist statistics is terrible, academic career structure is terrible, etc. etc.
And yes, it is important to actually have some first-hand experience regarding stuff you are criticizing, or at the very least ask people who do have it. See, e.g. Scott's critique of sneaky pharma practices. I would think this is obvious enough to not even need saying (but I wonder sometimes...)
I don't think academics are incentivized to hide flaws in academia enough that they are just silent about them. Plenty of academics criticize plenty of aspects of academia openly. For example, I recently talked to a very senior person who really hates peer reviewed conference publications (not conferences themselves though).
What have we learned from a random LW person opining about things (s)he likely has no experience with?
Not much either, but OP does say true factual things which can be easily checked and which do in fact undermine the claimed benefits of conferences: particularly how lectures are horrible forms of communication.
See, e.g. Scott's critique of sneaky pharma practices. I would think this is obvious enough to not even need saying (but I wonder sometimes...)
Yvain is a self-selected critic. In the mean time, there are countless psychiatrists who engage in ...
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?