A colleague from industry is co-organizing a fairly major conference in his field. He invited me to give a talk in the session he’s in charge of. I said sure, mostly as a favor to him. But, it turns out that I am responsible for all the expenses, including registration, and it’s not a conference I would normally go to. Okay, I can live with that, although the money is not trivial and I could have spent it differently. But, being that this is an important conference with considerable industry presence, showing my face there won’t be a total loss, and the networking will hopefully mean better job prospects for my students.

Then, at the eleventh hour, I find out that there is a mandatory paper to write.

I know there are fields like CS, where conferences are the primary mode of knowledge dissemination. In contrast, in my field and many others, conference papers are virtually irrelevant; they get neither read nor cited, yet they persist as a myth of relevance in certain old-fashioned subareas, so I occasionally get blindsided, like I just did, into writing a paper I don’t give a toss about. However, the paper cannot completely suck, since it’s going to be on the web for posterity, so I am now spending my weekend writing a full-length paper for a conference I don’t care about, when I should be working on a proposal or, you know, actually having a weekend off once in a blue moon, like normal people.

At this point in my career, the answer to “Would you come and give an invited talk?” is mostly:

Thanks for the invitation, but before I can respond, please let me know which expenses you plan to cover (e.g., registration, lodging, travel).

Apparently, I now also have to add:

Do I actually have to do any of the following:
— have the talk recorded;
— make slides available to the organizers ridiculously early (i.e., more than 15 min before the talk; have you actually ever met an academic?); 
— make my slides available on the web for posterity; 
— write a paper (that I don’t want to write and that nobody will read)?