# Cross-disciplinary real research conferences are underdone There are very few truly disciplinary-spanning research conferences. There are many valid reasons this is the case, but descriptions of ones that have happened have always been glowing. I also just have a hunch that it is an underdeveloped area of [[Activity Space]]. Conferences that bring together people doing real serious research in far-apart disciplines are rare. There are plenty of good reasons for this paucity. Such conferences are probably a waste of time for many researchers and probably suffer adverse selection. However, the two concrete examples of cross-disciplinary conferences that I’ve heard of, run by [[DARPA]] and [[Donald Braben]]’s BP research were by accounts incredibly valuable. Of course, the stories about them are not particularly objective, they fit my own biases, and the programs themselves may have selected for researchers who were particularly likely to benefit from the conference. That being said, a biased participant selection doesn’t seem like a problem: the goal isn’t to expose everybody in one discipline to everybody in another discipline, but to plant ideas and connections in the most fertile spots. My own experience with much smaller, but similarly flavored events corroborates how many new thoughts and discussions they foster. Ideally a conference like this would be easy for a DARPA-riff to pull off: you’re already running programs in several unrelated areas. Incidentally, this is a (minor) reason why [[Azobenzine is a phtoswitch]] shouldn’t specialize into one niche: there are plenty of organizations that could run single discipline conferences but few broad enough to run cross-disciplinary conferences. ### Related * [[Bell labs brought many disciplines together under the same roof and broke down barriers between them]] * [[Sufficient advances in one discipline can enable advances in another discipline]] * [[Addressing structural constraints often requires drawing on more than one discipline]] * [[Quantum leaps happen more often when people are enabled and encouraged to go outside the boundaries of current disciplines]] [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Cross-disciplinary+real+research+conferences+are+underdone) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/Cross-disciplinary+real+research+conferences+are+underdone)