which do in fact undermine the claimed benefits of conferences

But that's incredibly weak. By that logic, 4chan being terrible is (a) true, and (b) is evidence that we should shut LW down, because online forums are known for being terrible.

Yvain is a self-selected critic.

Yes. My point about Scott is he actually knows what he is talking about. Also, while he's brave for speaking up, he is not exactly getting ran out of Detroit by Big Pharma. The problem with outsiders is while they have no incentives to keep quiet, they also don't know what they are talking about, unless they did a lot of homework.

"Not knowing what you are talking about, but talking anyways" is a chronic lesswrong disease.

I agree that people will do evil things, and keep quiet about evil things -- anywhere. For example, if there is a politically powerful department person involved, etc. But academia is not Stalinist Russia, you are not going to get disappeared for loudly discussing flaws. And in fact, we have periodic academic scandals. Here is Broockman's paper, btw. It is super nifty.

http://stanford.edu/~dbroock/broockman_kalla_aronow_lg_irregularities.pdf

This is what "not keeping silent about flaws" looks like.

Getting back to conferences: my concrete claims are:

(a) There is no conspiracy of silence about conferences. There doesn't even seem to be a conspiracy of silence about data fraud.

(b) In fact, conferences are quite useful. For example, one big useful function of conferences is solving the coordination problem of scheduling collaboration time for lots of busy people. Without conferences, some collaborators will never get in the same room to get work done.

(c) Meta question: what does your process for figuring out if conferences are a waste of time look like? Does it involve dealing with any data about actual conferences at any point? Do you think the recent Cambridge conference MIRI helped finance (on decision theory) was a waste of time?

http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/events/decision-theory-conf

Contrary to what some posters may suspect about evil rent-seeker academics going to tropical paradises on taxpayer dime, academics are super busy, and constant travel is kind of a pain in the ass. I personally wish I could do less conference travel.

Peer review is terrible

Nah, peer review is pretty great. I am glad we had this productive chat about it. Do you do any peer review, gwern, or get any peer review?

_ as applied usually

That's like cards against humanity for anything.