It seems to be conference season around a few disciplines, so Kieran Healy and Daniel Drezner have a few words of advice for attendees. Most of the advice carries across well to philosophy, I think, though perhaps some of it could use qualification. I don’t really agree with Dan’s suggestion that one minimise consumption of caffeine and/or alcohol during these conferences – but I can see why people might think that. Turning up with little sleep and a raging headache to a talk, or better still a job interview, is really unpleasant. But it’s hard to party or network without booze and coffee, and they are the main reasons one conferences.

At a big conference, esp an APA, one of the hard things to do is work out which papers to attend. If you’re thinking about this, the first thing you should do is decide not to go to the APA, and instead go to a conference that is likely to have good papers, like the Bellingham Conference, or the Australasian Association for Philosophy conference. (Did I mention it is on the Great Barrier Reef next year?!)

If you don’t follow that advice, the best I can do is offer some empirical data. The papers I go to tend to fall into three categories.

1. Papers by my friends.
2. Papers by bigshots.
3. Papers on topics I’m interested in.

Obviously there’s some overlap between the categories, but it’s usually possible to say which of the three is the primary reason for attending. And as a rule the ordering given there (friends, bigshots, on topic) is the ordering is of the quality of the sessions. So probably in the future I should only go to papers by my friends, unless there’s a bigshot who is at least an acquaintance also speaking on a topic I care about.

Just how to generalise this result is hard. If you want to follow my lead, should you go to papers by your friends or by my friends?

In general it’s hard to say whether papers by unknowns or bigshots at these conferences will be better. Some bigshots are just recycling the same ideas (or the same papers) that made them famous in the first place. But not all. And some unknowns are not bigshots (or even intermediateshots) because, well, because they aren’t that good. But not all.

On the recycling old ideas theme, I just noticed that the deadline for next spring’s APAs is the end of the week, and that the blog post yesterday on evidence and knowledge is just about the right length for an APA submission. So I might try and polish that a bit, tighten up the jokes and loosen up the argument, and send it in.

While on the conference theme, did anyone go last year to The Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities? I can’t tell whether going is an inspired idea or just plain crazy. It might be fun in a post-APA way, and it might really be nice to get away from the snow for a few days in Hawaii. On the other hand, the conference looks like a bit of a joke, and I fear attending could make one part of the joke rather than in on the joke.