(Yes, going to a conference can be inefficient/terrible way of spending your time. It doesn't prove anything.) There are ways in which conferences fail. There's too little time to talk to other people, especially if they only came to make their report and then leave; you can't count on them accommodating you. (And if you want them to show you how they do things, it is even worse, so just plan it ahead.) There are sometimes lectures which you would not learn anything useful from, and you skip them without remorse, but you don't go to a conference just to skip stuff. There are people who will be less useful to you than you are to them, so what? It is good to be actually needed and not just cited. There are people who strongly disagree with your lab's approach, and they might not give you coherent feedback - that just means that you should write to them later.
I mean, yeah, it's not ideal, so what?
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?