I've heard repeatedly from many people that the highest-value part of conferences is not the talks or structured events, but rather the casual spontaneous conversations. Yet my own experience does not match this at all; the casual spontaneous conversations are consistently low-value.

My current best model is that the casual spontaneous conversations mostly don't have much instrumental value, most people just really enjoy them and want more casual conversation in their life.

... but I'm pretty highly uncertain about that model, and want more data. So, questions for you:

• What have been your highest-value casual conversations, especially at conferences or conference-like events?
• Is most of the value terminal (i.e. you enjoy casual conversation) or instrumental (i.e. advances other goals)? And if instrumental, what goals have some of your high-value conversations advanced and how?

Note that "it feels like there was something high value in but it's [...]

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