I feel for major conference organisers so much… It is probably impossible to predict even a quarter of the things that may go wrong, you can have very little personal impact on any of it, and the potential upside is “went ok” and the potential downside ranges from “starved the vegans” to “inadvertently fostered a hostile environment for <insert protected class> and now people on social media want Accountability”.

It is harder and harder to view these big conferences as a good idea. Every year, we pick an unlucky community member to be “sin eater” and preside over an unfathomable waste of fuel and electricity to put on what is in essence a “super-spreading” event for flu and covid (in the Winter no less!), all in order to have people give talks nobody pays attention to about things that are already readable in black and white, while the “hallway track” unfolds — which I think is not nearly as useful for early career networking as people say, although I cannot discount it entirely.

We could solve some of the hiccups by professionalising the conference organisation, but this would introduce even worse problems and further entrench these practices that are (in my opinion) bad for the health of our field and the Earth itself.

PL is growing year by year. Do we want to remain complacent until we have a NEURIPS-sized problem to solve?