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Leaving aside whether this'd be a good policy for a conference, this argument doesn't really check out for me. You can exchange ideas without making judgements
by ben0x539 6y ago
Leaving aside whether this'd be a good policy for a conference, this argument doesn't really check out for me.
You can exchange ideas without making judgements on other ideas. Like, let your ideas speak for themselves, marketplace of ideas etc, or even make comparisons without saying your ideas are _better or worse_ than other ideas.
I'm sure you wouldn't run out of useful and engaging conference content even with some hypothetical arbitrary rules like "don't say idea X is bad", "don't say person X is wrong about idea Y", like, at worst you'd have to make some minor edits to your slides and reword things to be less personal, unless your entire gimmick is that your presentation is a callout post.
- prewett 6y agoSome ideas have demonstratively poorer outcomes, or more succinctly: "bad". Some ideas are demonstratively at odds with the observed behavior of the world: "wrong". If you can't say "person X is wrong about idea Y" what kind of discussion can you have? How would you advise Galileo to present his paper on an experiment that demonstrated that the leading academic voice (Aristotle) was wrong?
- esfandia 6y agoResearch is literally predicated on showing results that are better than the state of the art. Without that judgment on other work there can be no progress in research!
- ben0x539 6y agoYou can talk up your cool new thing without explicit criticism of the old thing. Like, that's probably not a good rule for every conference in general, but it's a rule you could have for a specific conference without immediately disqualifying all possible good talks.