> and how therefore useless/wasteful it is My suggestion here would be to think about the purpose of the conversation. The goal of cocktail party conversations

> and how therefore useless/wasteful it is My suggestion here would be to think about the purpose of the conversation. The goal of cocktail party conversations is not to create working solutions to real world engineering problems. It is to create connections between people, and to have fun. Speculative but uninformed discussions about hard problems are indeed useful if they fulfil this goal. Let's face it, if all the "amateurs" in the room had enough insight to produce workable solutions, it would still be a "useless" conversation on a practical level because those people, working in unrelated fields, do not have the means or the opportunity to put their theories into practice.