I have never heard of a scientific conference with a $5000 prize. Was it a private fundraising conference? Perhaps it was private clinicians? Scientific research conferences are far more austere, but conferences for medical doctors are often like that (they do not usually get paid out of grants).
What you are describing is not normal. Please name the conference and shame it.
> One night the whole group of ~200 scientists and entourage was dancing late, drinking, and partying into the early morning hours.
Oh no, should we not have this? Do you really want to say this should not be happening?
Having conferences in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Newport, NYC, Miami, Boston, Chicago, Austin, is all normal. That is not wasteful. That is the necessary spread of ideas in science.
If your wife cannot understand why the data is not presented over Zoom than she is missing the primary purpose of these conferences which is meeting with lots of people in a short time to establish collaborations, chance encounters with new ideas and people, and other things that are not possible over Zoom. Perhaps she should stop wasting money by attending them and let others attend if she finds them wasteful.
Your representation of science is not the representation that I commonly see, and seems mostly to exist to discredit science. It seems that your intentions are more political rather than to accurately inform about the situation.
You say "political" as if expressing any hesitation whatsoever about how our limited taxpayer dollars are spent is some sort of insane delusion. Maybe think about how the average taxpayer trying to make ends meet would see this.
A conference could simply be inside one of the many large and existing academic buildings at one of our fine universities. Why they need to fly to a Las Vegas conference center is nonsensical
Why would I take any chance risking my wife's illustrious career on an internet forum? A career that supports maintenance and taxes on our historic mansion, multiple yearly vacations, our children's private school tuition, and our multiple monthly expensive restaurant meals? You surely must be joking!
Most universities do not contain sufficient capacity to host both the conference and the overnight stays of thousands of people. Even a major university would face significant disruption by hosting a conference, it is simply not built for it. Building venues at each university doesn’t make sense either because it doesn’t have 100% utilization.
Conference venues provide incentives by having cheap venue rent and minor discount on housing and the city makes money by having more people do fun things in their down time.
Purely from efficiency, disregarding politics or “waste” or “delusion”, conference centers are built for a very rational reason - it makes sense and saves money for event organizers.
Their point was fairly straightforward. Don't know why you are mischaracterizing it. They just said that it was weird that state driven budgets are used for splurging on a party, rather than using it purely for the "conference" part, i.e lunch+conference hall+utilities+special guest fees.
Prophylactically responding to your sure-to-come bad faith response, I'm not saying parties should be banned at conferences. If all involved want to indulge, a private sponsor could always fund it.
It is not the least bit established that state driven budgets are paying for this, that wasn't even in the comment. So making that assumption is not merited, much less telling me I should be taking it as evidence.
> Prophylactically responding to your sure-to-come bad faith response,
That you think this is a bad-faith response is a weird way to put it.
I certainly don't want to pay for all the sales kickoff parties and conferences that the employees of my software vendors pay for, yet I still am forced to. Should we run the government like a business, where the benefits of exchange of information is permitted, or should that only be allowed from paid sponsors?
There is a lot of bad faith in this thread but it's odd you should place it on me.
> I certainly don't want to pay for all the sales kickoff parties and conferences that the employees of my software vendors pay for, yet I still am forced to.
Yes, there is a difference between the way you treat government grants versus private voluntary sponsors. Such splurging of others money is bad. That private companies do it is unavoidable and impossible to mitigate. But you can definitely try to avoid it with government money.
> Benefits of exchange of information
You can sugarcoat "parties" how much ever you want, it remains a fact that it is not a necessary aspect of the conference.
What you are describing is not normal. Please name the conference and shame it.
> One night the whole group of ~200 scientists and entourage was dancing late, drinking, and partying into the early morning hours.
Oh no, should we not have this? Do you really want to say this should not be happening?
Having conferences in Las Vegas, San Francisco, Newport, NYC, Miami, Boston, Chicago, Austin, is all normal. That is not wasteful. That is the necessary spread of ideas in science.
If your wife cannot understand why the data is not presented over Zoom than she is missing the primary purpose of these conferences which is meeting with lots of people in a short time to establish collaborations, chance encounters with new ideas and people, and other things that are not possible over Zoom. Perhaps she should stop wasting money by attending them and let others attend if she finds them wasteful.
Your representation of science is not the representation that I commonly see, and seems mostly to exist to discredit science. It seems that your intentions are more political rather than to accurately inform about the situation.