> But I often wish more people could just go to conferences to discuss their work rather than "giving a talk" on it.
Very true point. I've been wondering why academics "suffer" so much from a system that they themselves created and are actively running (unpaid, all volunteers-based). Conferences are organized by academics for academics. Grants are subitted by and evalated by academics. Journals' editorial boards are staffed by academics to review the work of their peers.
Even metrics of merit are defined by scholars of scientrometrics, also academics, to rate the works of their peers. Yet we have a system where peer review has a high element of arbitrariness, lacks minimal professional standards, conferences organizers take too much of their valuable time to do a job (rotational, even!) that is often mediocre, and authors donate their papers for free to commercial publishers from which their institutions then buy these same papers back for a lot of money.
After a quick analysis of these entrenched systems in my first months of doctoral studies, I questioned the intelligence of people who first created such a system and then keep complaining about it, yet they make no move to change anything.
Let's invent a new meeting format where people basically travel to a nice place with few distractions in order to discuss their research informally, no talks.
In my field (computer science), it's what workshops once were before they became mini-conferences with three minutes question time (for all the questions from the whole audience after one talk, not per person asking) after talks.
PS [edit]: I once saw two older professors discussing something on the corridor floor of a conference while talks were going on inside the various rooms. They were sitting on the floor, both held pens and there were some loose papers scattered on the floor. This was right were people coming out of talks would have had to walk over them. I had skipped that session, so I asked them what they were doing. They said "Oh, we're writing a paper. We only meet twice a yeara some conference, that's when we need to get most of our important work done." At the time I found it funny, but with the benefit of hindsight isn't it a sad state of affairs?