And other ways to make event content more valuable.
I organise and attend a lot of conferences, so the below is correct and need not be caveated based on my experience, but I could be missing some angles here. Also on my substack.
When you imagine a session at an event going wrong, you’re probably thinking of the hapless, unlucky speaker. Maybe their slides broke, they forgot their lines, or they tripped on a cable and took the whole stage backdrop down.
This happens sometimes, but event organizers usually remember to invest the effort required to prevent this from happening (e.g., checking that the slides work, not leaving cables lying on the stage).
But there’s another big way that sessions go wrong that is sorely neglected: wasting everyone’s time, often without people noticing.
Let’s give talks a break. They often suck, but event organizers are mostly doing the right things to make them not suck. I’m going to pick on two event formats that (often) suck, why they suck, and how to run more useful content instead.
Panels
Panels. (very often). suck.
Reid Hoffman (and others) have already explained why, but this message has not yet reached a wide enough audience:
Because panelists know they'll only have limited time to speak, they tend to focus on clear and simple messages that will resonate with the broadest number of people. The result is that you get one person giving you an overly simplistic take on the subject at hand. And then the process repeats itself multiple times! Instead of going deeper or providing more nuance, the panel format ensures shallowness.
Even worse, this shallow discourse manifests as polite groupthink. After all, panelists attend conferences for the same reasons that attendees do – they want to make connections and build relationships. So panels end up heavy on positivity and agreement, and light on the sort of discourse which, through contrasting opinions and debate, could potentially be more illuminating.
The worst form of shal
This is going to sound like an accusation, but that's because it's part of my biggest broad source of skepticism of him as a public intellectual. It seems like on a huge range of issues, from human nature, to free will, to X-risks, to animal rights, to land use, to immigration, to civil rights, Caplan holds the view most convenient to anarcho-capitalism that he can plausibly defend (and occasionally view I think are quite hard to plausibly defend). This doesn't indicate any specific view, again most of his views are at least plausible and I agree with many of them, but as a trend it's hard to ignore. Given this, I was wondering if you could ask for examples of views he holds that are most inconvenient for his politics, especially if there are reasonably plausible, more convenient alternatives that he nonetheless rejects on consideration. If not, or maybe in addition, I was wondering if he could comment on the general trend - for instance if he thinks that there is enough of a common element to all of these views that their combination is independently plausible without invoking bias.
Fair, fair, and fair. I do think there are mitigating responses to all of these points as well, but I’ll concede the point that these are cases on the fringes of convenience for him. I was personally more thinking about IQ if I had to think of an example - he seems to place more importance on it than most people, but as I think he pointed out in a blog post I can’t find now, this leads just an awful lot of people to really statist and quasi or outright fascist views, so even if it doesn’t actually imply fascism, it’s an area where adopting a view closer to the average would be more convenient, provide an additional reason he could give against such people.