The Serenity Prayer from Alcoholics Anonymous resonates deeply: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” I find myself praying for similar discernment, particularly about the value of academic conferences today.

Observing the conference landscape, I see organizers who are hardly paragons of purity. Hungry for relevance, many latched onto COVID-19 as a topic and then hastily pivoted to AI. I could elaborate, but sometimes simply holding up a mirror is enough.

In my experience, there are three types of conferences:

1. The Substantive Conference, where ideas genuinely progress from one point to another (as depicted in Arthur Koestler’s The Call Girls). This type has largely died out.
2. The Keynote Conference, which hinges on a single thinker with something meaningful to say (figures like Nassim Taleb or Henry Mintzberg come to mind). Today, however, even these speakers often chase trends, delivering predictable commentary on COVID or AI. (This is not a new decline—decades ago, the fashionable “bullshit” was marketing or linear programming. Our evolution is superficial.)
3. The Networking Conference, the large, traditional gathering with thousands of attendees. This is now the only type I might send a doctoral student to.

This brings us to a core principle: participants must submit an abstract. But as the prayer implies, I can only write one if I have something substantive to summarize. For me, that means engaging with Karl Popper’s problem-solving process: beginning with a genuine initial problem (P1), developing a tentative theory (TT), applying error elimination (EE), and arriving at a refined problem (P2).

I can imagine different researchers starting from the same P1 and reaching different P2s. What I find unimaginable is that thousands of conference participants would all converge on the same P1—unless, of course, that problem is the generic fear that “AI will eliminate jobs,” leading to the equally generic conclusion that “AI takes jobs.”

P.S.: Authors should aim to produce original, insightful, engaging, and meaningful articles that demonstrate a significant “value-added” contribution to understanding a problem space.