I wonder how much of the issue is that we are calling online events “conferences”, and thus encouraging people to try to (imperfectly) replicate the experience of an in-person conference. We are used to the idea that talks are different things from written papers, even when they cover much of the same material and argument. While some people just read the paper at a talk, most do things somewhat differently in a way that is better for the format, so that we can’t really say that a talk or a paper is “better” than the other - the paper gets you the more polished formulation of the precise statement, and more ties to the past literature, while the talk gets you better access to the intuitions and an ability to respond to specific audience worries.
We may need to think of online events as a third, different sort of thing, rather than trying to imitate either of the others. There was a bit of experimentation on various philosophy blogs ten or fifteen years ago, where a bunch of people would post papers and then have days-long discussions in the comment threads - I forget if they called them “conferences”, but even if they did, the format was obviously different enough that it didn’t suffer from the comparison.
I wonder how much of the issue is that we are calling online events “conferences”, and thus encouraging people to try to (imperfectly) replicate the experience of an in-person conference. We are used to the idea that talks are different things from written papers, even when they cover much of the same material and argument. While some people just read the paper at a talk, most do things somewhat differently in a way that is better for the format, so that we can’t really say that a talk or a paper is “better” than the other - the paper gets you the more polished formulation of the precise statement, and more ties to the past literature, while the talk gets you better access to the intuitions and an ability to respond to specific audience worries.
We may need to think of online events as a third, different sort of thing, rather than trying to imitate either of the others. There was a bit of experimentation on various philosophy blogs ten or fifteen years ago, where a bunch of people would post papers and then have days-long discussions in the comment threads - I forget if they called them “conferences”, but even if they did, the format was obviously different enough that it didn’t suffer from the comparison.
Yes, I like that thought. I remember those "conferences", back in the day!