The Nonlinear Library EA - Conferences are great for scientific entrepreneurs by JP Addison
Apr 16, 2024
07:21
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Conferences are great for scientific entrepreneurs, published by JP Addison on April 16, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
By Jacob Trefethen
Scientific conferences are great even if you're an outsider to the field. That's common advice for students, and there are
useful
guides written on how to get the most out of conferences you're new to. But I suspect people at all career stages could benefit from hearing the advice again - people with adjacent research experience in industry or academia, or who have started organisations before, or who have an inkling something exciting lurks around the corner.
In other words, I wish people reminded me to go to conferences as an outsider more often. I seem to re-learn their value with wonder every one I attend. So here is a post for you, future Jacob.
Often scientific fields host annual conferences that have been running for a decade, or many decades. People grumble about the schedule and the snacks. Jetlag is a daze. The hotels nearby are expensive and the bedroom ceilings are low. Whatever you do, you are always missing something - talks, meeting people you could have emailed ahead of time, bottomless mingling. If you haven't attended previous years of the conference, you feel like a foreigner in a land where everyone else is old friends.
For new timers and old timers alike, the days are exhausting.
That's all a sign it's working! (Apart from the bedroom ceilings, those are just bad.)
Conferences are dense informational and social experiences. One half-hour presentation may contain data from two years of experiments, or from a clinical trial involving three thousand participants. The next presentation may be so cool you decide to change what you're working on. You may meet someone you go on to write a paper with, or who wants to hire you in three years, or who you end up
collaborating with for decades.
(Collaboration can take many forms, and I should disclose my existential bias here. My mother and father met at a mathematics conference in Texas.)
To the best of my understanding, I only have one life to live
but if you gave me more I'd spend some of them looping through these nine steps:
Scrounge together a plane ticket and discount entry to a conference on a scientific topic I'm interested in. Bonus points if it's in a city I've never been to. (Check with the conference organisers whether they have travel grants available.)
Attend a day of presentations and write down at least two questions for the presenters whose talks I found most interesting. Wander through the poster sessions and try to come up with one question for anyone whose poster title looks interesting.
Work up the nerve to approach the presenters. (
One and a half beers is often my trick, but you may have your own.) Tell them I liked their talk or poster, and ask them the first question. See where it goes.
Collapse in bed and pat myself on the back.
The week after, sit down for a few hours with some of the papers of the people I talked to who I have the best feeling about. Chat to GPT-4 or Claude 3 about the ideas in the papers as I go, and ask for explanations of the terminology I don't understand. Jot down some ideas for alternate interpretations of the data, or objections to the argument, or how you could take the ideas in the paper further - what experiments would you run next?
Follow up by email with whoever's work I find myself thinking about the most, and ask if I could visit their lab for a day or three some time.
If they say yes, make myself unobtrusive and perhaps even useful during the day, and chat over lunch. Ask if there's anything they wish they could take into application that isn't a great fit for academic research. Meet the postdocs and grad students in the lab, and chat as much as they're in the mood for. Ask what they're working on. Ask wh...
By Jacob Trefethen
Scientific conferences are great even if you're an outsider to the field. That's common advice for students, and there are
useful
guides written on how to get the most out of conferences you're new to. But I suspect people at all career stages could benefit from hearing the advice again - people with adjacent research experience in industry or academia, or who have started organisations before, or who have an inkling something exciting lurks around the corner.
In other words, I wish people reminded me to go to conferences as an outsider more often. I seem to re-learn their value with wonder every one I attend. So here is a post for you, future Jacob.
Often scientific fields host annual conferences that have been running for a decade, or many decades. People grumble about the schedule and the snacks. Jetlag is a daze. The hotels nearby are expensive and the bedroom ceilings are low. Whatever you do, you are always missing something - talks, meeting people you could have emailed ahead of time, bottomless mingling. If you haven't attended previous years of the conference, you feel like a foreigner in a land where everyone else is old friends.
For new timers and old timers alike, the days are exhausting.
That's all a sign it's working! (Apart from the bedroom ceilings, those are just bad.)
Conferences are dense informational and social experiences. One half-hour presentation may contain data from two years of experiments, or from a clinical trial involving three thousand participants. The next presentation may be so cool you decide to change what you're working on. You may meet someone you go on to write a paper with, or who wants to hire you in three years, or who you end up
collaborating with for decades.
(Collaboration can take many forms, and I should disclose my existential bias here. My mother and father met at a mathematics conference in Texas.)
To the best of my understanding, I only have one life to live
but if you gave me more I'd spend some of them looping through these nine steps:
Scrounge together a plane ticket and discount entry to a conference on a scientific topic I'm interested in. Bonus points if it's in a city I've never been to. (Check with the conference organisers whether they have travel grants available.)
Attend a day of presentations and write down at least two questions for the presenters whose talks I found most interesting. Wander through the poster sessions and try to come up with one question for anyone whose poster title looks interesting.
Work up the nerve to approach the presenters. (
One and a half beers is often my trick, but you may have your own.) Tell them I liked their talk or poster, and ask them the first question. See where it goes.
Collapse in bed and pat myself on the back.
The week after, sit down for a few hours with some of the papers of the people I talked to who I have the best feeling about. Chat to GPT-4 or Claude 3 about the ideas in the papers as I go, and ask for explanations of the terminology I don't understand. Jot down some ideas for alternate interpretations of the data, or objections to the argument, or how you could take the ideas in the paper further - what experiments would you run next?
Follow up by email with whoever's work I find myself thinking about the most, and ask if I could visit their lab for a day or three some time.
If they say yes, make myself unobtrusive and perhaps even useful during the day, and chat over lunch. Ask if there's anything they wish they could take into application that isn't a great fit for academic research. Meet the postdocs and grad students in the lab, and chat as much as they're in the mood for. Ask what they're working on. Ask wh...