What Have Been Your Most Valuable Casual Conversations At Conferences?

Some casual conversations with strangers that were high instrumental value:

At my first (online) LessWrong Community Weekend in 2020, I happened to chat with Linda Linsefors. That was my first conversation with anyone working in AI Safety. I’d read about the alignment problem for almost a decade at that point and thought it was the most important thing in the world, but I’d never seriously considered working on it. MIRI had made it pretty clear that the field only needed really exceptional theorists, and I didn’t think I was one of those. That conversation with Linda started the process of robbing me of my comfortable delusions on this front. What she said made it seem more like the field was pretty inadequate, and perfectly normal theoretical physicists could maybe help just by applying the standard science playbook for figuring out general laws in a new domain. Horrifying. I didn't really believe it yet, but this conversation was a factor in me trying out AI Safety Camp a bit over a year later.

At my first EAG, I talked to someone who was waiting for the actual event to begin along with me. This turned out to be Vivek Hebbar, who I'd never heard of before. We got to talking about inductive biases of neural networks. We kept chatting about this research area sporadically for a few weeks after the event. Eventually, Vivek called me to talk about the idea that would become this post [LW · GW]. Thinking about that idea led to me understanding the connection between basin broadness and representation dimensionality in neural networks, which ultimately resulted in this [LW · GW] research. It was probably the most valuable conversation I’ve had at any EAG so far, and it was unplanned.

At my second EAG, someone told me that an idea for comparing NN representations I’d been talking to them about already existed, and was called centred kernel alignment. I don’t quite remember how that conversation started, but I think it might have been a speed friending event.

My first morning in the MATS kitchen area in Berkeley, someone [LW · GW] asked me if I’d heard about a thing called Singular Learning Theory. I had not. He went through his spiel on the whiteboard. He didn’t have the explanation down nearly as well back then, but it still very recognisably connected to how I’d been thinking about NN generalisation and basin broadness, so I kept an eye on the area.

At my CFAR Workshop in 2015, probably the most valuable bit was meeting Oliver Habryka at the afterparty and talking under the stars for an hour or two, our working relationship and friendship grew immediately out of that meeting.

The conversation went pretty deep into x-risk and rationality, but it was more that it created a connection around that sort of thinking. I do think that a bunch of the value I get from connecting with people at events like these is that then I later feel comfortable sharing them on google docs or sending them emails for feedback on ideas.

I get a nontrivial fraction of value out of parties and conferences by "doing the rounds". I.e. I say hello to all the people I have standing relationships with, briefly meet the people they are with, give them an opportunity to bring up anything they wanted to talk to me about, or any important news they wanted to share, and bring up things I wanted to talk to them specifically about. The median conversation length here is like 5-10 minutes, but once or twice per event I end up talking for longer. 

I think the key things that make this valuable is that it maintains a relatively large set of relationships at a higher level of trust, and also gives each conversation a very gradual ability to escalate in length and complexity (as opposed to scheduled meetings which always take a fixed amount of time).

At the 2024 LessWrong Community weekend I met somebody who I have been working with for perhaps 50 hours so far. They are better at certain programming related tasks than me, in a way provided utility. Before meeting them they where not even considering working on AI alignment related things. The conversation wen't something like this:

Johannes: What are you working on.
Other Person: Web development. What are you working on?
Johannes: I am trying to understand intelligence such that we can build a system that is capable enough to prevent other misaligned AI's from being build, and that we understand enough such that we can be sure that it wouldn't kill us. [...] Why are you not working on it? Other Person: (I forgot what he said)
Johannes: Oh then now is the perfect time to start working on it.
Other Person: So what are you actually doing.
Johannes: (Describes some methodologies.)
Other Person: (Questions whether these methodologies are actually good, and thinks about how they could be better.)
[...]

Actually this all happened after the event when traveling from the venue to the train station.

It doesn't happen that often that I get something really good out of a random meeting. Most of them are bad. However, I think the most important thing I do to get something out is to just immediately talk about the things that I am interested in. This efficiently filters out people, either because they are not interested, or because they can't talk it.

You can overdo this. Starting a conversation with "AI seems very powerful, I think it will likely destroy the world" can make other people feel awkward (I know from experience). However, the above formula of "what do you do" and then "and I do this" get's to the point very quickly without inducing awkwardness.

Basically you can think of this as making random encounters (like walking back to the train station with randomly sampled people) non-random by always trying to steer any encounter such that it becomes useful.

My girlfriend and I probably wouldn't have got together if not for a conversation at Less Wrong Community Weekend.

Going to an EA conference was the first time I made friends from Western Europe. (I live in a developing country.)

I realised that Europeans on average experience a higher level of emotional security and willingness to be vulnerable than people of my country. I realised this just by hearing what said people do in their free time, or what their personal relationships are like. 

This then pushed me into a rabbit hole trying to figure out why this is the case, and reading more about generational trauma and the various decisions made by country leaders - Deng, Mao, Xi Jinping, Lee Kuan Yew, Nehru, etc - and their impact on people’s psychology. 

I became noticeably less optimistic about geopolitical plans like dropping nukes on the other country when they won’t yield on important issue X, after this experience. I realised I need to factor in longterm psychological effects like parents beating their kids because that’s what the previous generation normalised for them. 

I have updated upwards on “culture” being a predictor of what any set of people do. Two groups with identical material resources can have vastly different cultures and therefore future outcomes. 

A conversation I had in 2021

Them: Man I wish I could do X, it's so much more valuable then what I'm doing right now, but I can't.
Me: But could you though?

I'd forgotten this, but in 2023 they came up to thank me because they were doing X, were pleased with the choice, and assigned me some credit for it.  I've heard other people spontaneously praise project X, without knowing I'd been involved in any way. 

It's also very common for seeing someone at a conference to move them along the path of hiring me. Rarely from 0-> hired, but maybe from 0-> idea, or from "been meaning to"->hired, or something in the middle.

I suspect this varies by event, and also what you think of as "value". At LessOnline I got a large fraction of the value out of side conversations, but that value mostly wasn't in the form of practical benefits; the kinds of conversations on offer were simply extremely scarce in the rest of my personal life.

OTOH, at Dragoncon I get most of the value from structured events and the general sense of being-among-one's-tribe. It's crowded and anonymous, making private conversations difficult, and I know plenty of other fans in my everyday life, so there's not that sense of "suddenly having a badly-needed outlet". Two decades ago, when fandom conventions were smaller and local geeks were (for me) rare-to-nonexistent, that was less true.

I've been to quite a few Python conferences; typically I find the unstructured time in hallways, over dinner, and in "sprints" both fun and valuable. I've made great friends and recruited new colleagues, conceived and created new libraries, built professional relationships, hashed out how to fix years-old infelicities in various well-known things, etc.

Conversations at afterparties led me to write concrete reasons for hope about AI [LW · GW], and at another event met a friend working on important-to-me biotechnology (I later invested in their startup). I've also occasionally taken something useful away from AI safety conversations, or in one memorable late-night at LessOnline hopefully conveyed something important about my work.

There are many more examples, but it also feels telling that I can't give you examples of conference talks that amazed me in person (there are some great ones recorded but your odds are low, and most I'd prefer to read a good written verion instead), and structured events I've enjoyed are things like "the Python language summit" or "conference dinners which are mostly socializing" - so arguably the bar is low

Most of the time, the most high value conversations aren't fully spontaneous for me but they're rather on open questions that I've already prepped beforehand. They can still be very casual, it is just that I'm gathering info in the background.

I usually check out the papers submitted or the participants if it's based on swapcard and do some research beforehand on what people I want to meet. Then I usually have some good opener that leads to some interesting conversations. These conversations can be very casual and can span wide areas but I feel I'm building a relationship with an interesting individual and that's really the main benefit for me. 

At the latest ICML, I talked to a bunch of interesting multi-agent researchers through this method and I now have people I can ask stupid questions.

I also always come to conferences with one or more specific projects that I want advice on which makes these conversations a lot easier to have.

High variance but there's skew. The ceiling is very high and the downside is just a bit of wasted time that likely would have been wasted anyway. The most valuable alert me to entirely different ways of thinking about problems I've been working on.