I've been inside the conference- I used to do due diligence and discovery for Google Ventures and they gave me a ticket one year. The "talks" were eminently forgettable ("we put this in X people and Y died") and the power meetings were... also fairly forgettable. A lot of it is just puffery, and a lot of the dealmakers have no real understanding of the area they are in (softbank seems to be the place where bad ideas go to be funded and then die). Then there are the sharks, cruising around looking for easy pickings.
My favorite conference-that-is-not-really-a-conference is Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. The bar to get a paper in is really low, and it's set at a nice resort in Hawaii. The whole conference would just empty out all day so people could go to beaches, etc. It starts on a Friday and ends on a Monday. About the only highlight for me was sitting down at the bar and spontaneously meeting Lynn Conway- "what do you do?" "oh, I worked on VLSI...."
All the action at PSB happens in the hot tub discussions. I didn't spend any time in them, as I was too junior and didn't know the right people, but PSB did get me some good post doc options!
Not much industry there though, unless it's changed in recent years. One of the more scientifically productive conferences because of the connections that people establish.
(Inside JPMorgan is so crowded and not so useful. I got a really really bad impression of 10X when I saw their debut at JPMorgan but that was an incorrect impression because they have done really well, mostly by not actually doing any of the products they touted at their presentation.).
Unlikely. Everyone who visits the conference, which is on an interdimensional craft only visible to Donald Hoffman and Federico Faggin who have dreamed it up, is replaced by a mind-replicant whose memory of the conference has been wiped, right before their original self starts to play a 1234.567 hour game of Rummikub, where there are no rules and you must guess all of the tiles, on the way to a virtual conference in a space station mirage outside of what you call KOI-94 in the Exosyzygy system, because they have a nice spa there and there is a convenient proprietary video conferencing system for this part of the universe.
Either that or I’m getting it mixed up with another conference.
For some reason this rings a bell - is there an article/blog/post/message in a bottle about Lynn Conway at that conference (and how it’s not really conference; lol?).
The point of the conference is not the official conference itself, but the meetings that happen around the conference. This is not true of all conferences, but for the JPMHC, and many other major conferences, that is the entire point. It's just a way to get people all in one place at one time, so that there is an efficient gathering to do deals.
Funds pay thousands, often $10K+, per room at the nearby hotels, often spending hundreds of thousands to book over a dozen hotel rooms to use as makeshift conference rooms. The hotels often don't even allow people to sleep in the rooms, only to use them strictly as conference rooms.
All the real action happens in those hotel rooms, at private events, private receptions, etc.
> The point of the conference is not the official conference itself, but the meetings that happen around the conference.
In a lot of the corporate-sponsored conferences I go to - the networking and discussions happen around the talks - some talks are good, but they are not targeted towards the decision makers: the real discussions happen in the corridors, the meeting rooms, in the parties, the after-parties and, mostly, the after-after-parties.
> It's just a way to get people all in one place at one time, so that there is an efficient gathering to do deals.
It's not efficient. It's plausibly deniable.
People want to be able to meet and gauge interest in the most speculative stuff, discuss the far out future of industry, and discuss all manner of other things with other industry people, etc, etc, without a bunch of talking heads and twitter comment section screeching about "OMG the C-whatever-O of X met with the C-whatever-O of Y" and it being reported on and markets moving.
"if you had to meet a stranger in New York City on a specific day, with no way to communicate beforehand, where would you go?"
The answer to that in San Francisco was once "meet me by the clock", which is in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel.[1]
"There’s no easy way to sugarcoat this, so I’ll just come out and say it: it is possible that the entirety of California is built on top of one immensely large organism, and the particular spot in which the Westin St. Francis Hotel stands—335 Powell Street, San Francisco, 94102—is located directly above its beating heart."
That clock is a master clock, synchronizing the other clocks in the hotel. In the past, the synchronizing signals from that clock drove some other clocks in the downtown area. So it really is the beating heart of the city.
The clock was recently overhauled, and is acting as the master clock again. For years, the hotel's time signals were coming from an electric motor clock and then a quartz time standard. But they've reverted to the pendulum clock. Error is about 5 seconds a month.
> The clock was recently overhauled, and is acting as the master clock again. For years, the hotel's time signals were coming from an electric motor clock and then a quartz time standard. But they've reverted to the pendulum clock. Error is about 5 seconds a month.
Can't anyone donate them a retired Cesium clock? Or, at least, a GPS receiver.
I got power schmoozed once. Why they mistook me for being worth the investment in time was beyond me. It's a strange feeling being led into the presence, assumed to have knowledge and power, and be offered.. something intangible to help them do .. something unclear.
Maybe my failure to read latent signals is why this doesn't repeat. When you do get to the elven castle, you don't remember much that happened inside, but now you're back on a quest and your donkey has more food.
I do think this stuff happens. Side deals which move markets, people who taste test in lowly techs and then advise private equity buyers to move or not. You aren't the talent, your information value informs the talent going to do their job with bigger fish.
> The conference has six focuses: AI in Drug Discovery, AI in Diagnostics, AI for Operational Efficiency, AI in Remote Healthcare, AI in Regulatory Compliance, and AI Ethics. Every single theme of this conference has converged onto AI as the only thing worth discussing.
I experienced the same situation at the human factors and ergonomics society (HFES) annual conference a few months ago. This was fine for me because I'm part of the (relatively small) AI/ML group at my company, which has traditionally focused on developing human factors engineering solutions and services. In fact the reason I was sent to HFES was to help bridge my background (phd in computational neuro) to the broader company mission. And to be honest I was looking forward to hearing (what I assumed was going to be) a wide diversity of talks. I mean, ergonomics... there will probably be like companies presenting next generation office chair designs or some shit, I thought. Instead I estimate that 50% of the talks were on one of three topics: AI trust, Explainable AI, or Human-AI teaming. Another 30-40% were on some other AI related issue, with the remaining 10-20% accounting for all other possible topics related to human factors and ergonomics.
I wonder what will be the repercussions from this current hyper-obsession with AI, and the resulting neglect to many other viable areas of research. I foresee a near future where chairs are packed with AI features, and are the source of much back pain.
The conference sessions aren't what matters. The important thing about these kinds of industry conferences is the ability for investors, leaders, regulators, journalists, and others to meet with each other in a neutral zone. Multiple M&As are being negotiated, IPOs being considered, funds trying to raise a new vintage, and companies starting press junkets in preparation for a roadshow.
> it is possible that the entirety of California is built on top of one immensely large organism, and the particular spot in which the Westin St. Francis Hotel stands—335 Powell Street, San Francisco, 94102—is located directly above its beating heart. And that this is the primary organizing focal point for both the location and entire reason for the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference
Moscone Center tends to be the primary hub for industry conferences in the City (eg. RSA, Dreamforce, Oracle OpenWorld way back in the day), and more niche executive events are in the Four Seasons or St Regis. My hunch is that JPM has a multi-year deal with the Westin to host the conference at the Westin.
Seems like a subset of enthusiasts - early stage VC types, people working in product, people who write lengthy healthcare posts on LinkedIn, have been trying to position it as another HLTH, but that’s not what it is. It’s an investor conference that you need to be invited to. Wouldn’t be surprising if JPM somehow had taken a stake or done a deal with your company, combined with some government insiders.
The digital health community, however, has used it to start off the new year with a bang. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Not surprising. Take any conference and look at the schedule of some CEO or other “socialite” attending said conference. They’re not in the building, they’re running around town attending meetings. At JPMHC everyone is a “socialite”
This is good writing at its peak. I don't care about the subject matter, but reading it is a joy. The references, the writing style, the pace.. Love it.
I can't speak for this conference, but fake conference scams do exist.
I have a friend who fell for one. He won the Dutch "Student of the Year" award in... I think 2006. When our then-minister of education proposed to make maths more popular in high school by dumbing down the curriculum, he organized a giant STEM activity day on a nation-wide scale to popularize it. We were both physics student at the time.
Anyway, as part of the award he was allowed to pick a conference to go to. He chose one in Spain. When he arrived it turned out he had fallen for an internet scam: the conference only existed as a scam website and the money had disappeared. He still had a nice weekend with his best buddy (now husband) though, and at least it didn't cost him anything.
The website linked in the article appears to not be _the_ website (to be fair, tfa only calls it _a_ website). The website actually hosted by JPM is very sparse, but even mentions that such unofficial websites exist.
A plausible fake is otherwise known as a honeypot; they way others interact with your creation tells you their role in the system.
I can't comment on the authenticity of JPMHC. But it's interesting to think about who might benefit from creating a similar fake and observing how the world reacts to it. Will job candidates fraudulently list it on their resumes? If people publish articles claiming to have attended, what are their incentives? If you promote the conference ahead of time, will real researchers pitch talk ideas to you?
Close to my heart as I'm at the actual JPM conference this year. The author's not running in the right healthcare circles though which is why they hasn't met them. If they were connected with the CEO and/or CFOs of health systems or any of the public companies presenting, they'd definitely know people that have attended. Regardless, fun read though. And it is true, -hard- to get in.
Beautiful writing, thank you. I have already incorporated this into my world view and am ready and willing to die for the creature that lives underneath San Francisco.
from my understanding, it's a healthcare investors conference where investors meet companies (both public and private), esp those looking to fund raise.
My wife was there last year. There are a lot of investment opportunities. Plenty of dinners and meetings away from the conference. It's the whole drinking from a fire hose as there is too much to see and do.
dekhn|1 month ago
My favorite conference-that-is-not-really-a-conference is Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing. The bar to get a paper in is really low, and it's set at a nice resort in Hawaii. The whole conference would just empty out all day so people could go to beaches, etc. It starts on a Friday and ends on a Monday. About the only highlight for me was sitting down at the bar and spontaneously meeting Lynn Conway- "what do you do?" "oh, I worked on VLSI...."
epistasis|1 month ago
Not much industry there though, unless it's changed in recent years. One of the more scientifically productive conferences because of the connections that people establish.
(Inside JPMorgan is so crowded and not so useful. I got a really really bad impression of 10X when I saw their debut at JPMorgan but that was an incorrect impression because they have done really well, mostly by not actually doing any of the products they touted at their presentation.).
defalcon47|1 month ago
Unlikely. Everyone who visits the conference, which is on an interdimensional craft only visible to Donald Hoffman and Federico Faggin who have dreamed it up, is replaced by a mind-replicant whose memory of the conference has been wiped, right before their original self starts to play a 1234.567 hour game of Rummikub, where there are no rules and you must guess all of the tiles, on the way to a virtual conference in a space station mirage outside of what you call KOI-94 in the Exosyzygy system, because they have a nice spa there and there is a convenient proprietary video conferencing system for this part of the universe.
Either that or I’m getting it mixed up with another conference.
saaaaaam|1 month ago
buildbot|1 month ago
gadders|1 month ago
lesser-shadow|1 month ago
[deleted]
lesdeuxmagots|1 month ago
Funds pay thousands, often $10K+, per room at the nearby hotels, often spending hundreds of thousands to book over a dozen hotel rooms to use as makeshift conference rooms. The hotels often don't even allow people to sleep in the rooms, only to use them strictly as conference rooms.
All the real action happens in those hotel rooms, at private events, private receptions, etc.
rbanffy|1 month ago
In a lot of the corporate-sponsored conferences I go to - the networking and discussions happen around the talks - some talks are good, but they are not targeted towards the decision makers: the real discussions happen in the corridors, the meeting rooms, in the parties, the after-parties and, mostly, the after-after-parties.
cal_dent|1 month ago
baxtr|1 month ago
There are even some companies that offer this style of conferences as meetings for money to vendors.
What I wonder though: How many deals are really made in these rooms? I always had the feeling that the conversion rates were rather low if not zero.
tptacek|1 month ago
potato3732842|1 month ago
It's not efficient. It's plausibly deniable.
People want to be able to meet and gauge interest in the most speculative stuff, discuss the far out future of industry, and discuss all manner of other things with other industry people, etc, etc, without a bunch of talking heads and twitter comment section screeching about "OMG the C-whatever-O of X met with the C-whatever-O of Y" and it being reported on and markets moving.
Animats|1 month ago
The answer to that in San Francisco was once "meet me by the clock", which is in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel.[1]
"There’s no easy way to sugarcoat this, so I’ll just come out and say it: it is possible that the entirety of California is built on top of one immensely large organism, and the particular spot in which the Westin St. Francis Hotel stands—335 Powell Street, San Francisco, 94102—is located directly above its beating heart."
That clock is a master clock, synchronizing the other clocks in the hotel. In the past, the synchronizing signals from that clock drove some other clocks in the downtown area. So it really is the beating heart of the city.
The clock was recently overhauled, and is acting as the master clock again. For years, the hotel's time signals were coming from an electric motor clock and then a quartz time standard. But they've reverted to the pendulum clock. Error is about 5 seconds a month.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGK_OaMVPUs
rbanffy|1 month ago
Can't anyone donate them a retired Cesium clock? Or, at least, a GPS receiver.
dboreham|1 month ago
ggm|1 month ago
Maybe my failure to read latent signals is why this doesn't repeat. When you do get to the elven castle, you don't remember much that happened inside, but now you're back on a quest and your donkey has more food.
I do think this stuff happens. Side deals which move markets, people who taste test in lowly techs and then advise private equity buyers to move or not. You aren't the talent, your information value informs the talent going to do their job with bigger fish.
ooterness|1 month ago
1. Do you know anybody from "J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference"?
2. Have you ever been to "J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference"?
3. Do you know anybody who has ever been to "J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference"?
Havoc|1 month ago
CGMthrowaway|1 month ago
Anon84|1 month ago
subroutine|1 month ago
I experienced the same situation at the human factors and ergonomics society (HFES) annual conference a few months ago. This was fine for me because I'm part of the (relatively small) AI/ML group at my company, which has traditionally focused on developing human factors engineering solutions and services. In fact the reason I was sent to HFES was to help bridge my background (phd in computational neuro) to the broader company mission. And to be honest I was looking forward to hearing (what I assumed was going to be) a wide diversity of talks. I mean, ergonomics... there will probably be like companies presenting next generation office chair designs or some shit, I thought. Instead I estimate that 50% of the talks were on one of three topics: AI trust, Explainable AI, or Human-AI teaming. Another 30-40% were on some other AI related issue, with the remaining 10-20% accounting for all other possible topics related to human factors and ergonomics.
I wonder what will be the repercussions from this current hyper-obsession with AI, and the resulting neglect to many other viable areas of research. I foresee a near future where chairs are packed with AI features, and are the source of much back pain.
semiquaver|1 month ago
This sort of writing is what AI will take from us.
alephnerd|1 month ago
> it is possible that the entirety of California is built on top of one immensely large organism, and the particular spot in which the Westin St. Francis Hotel stands—335 Powell Street, San Francisco, 94102—is located directly above its beating heart. And that this is the primary organizing focal point for both the location and entire reason for the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference
Moscone Center tends to be the primary hub for industry conferences in the City (eg. RSA, Dreamforce, Oracle OpenWorld way back in the day), and more niche executive events are in the Four Seasons or St Regis. My hunch is that JPM has a multi-year deal with the Westin to host the conference at the Westin.
abhishaike|1 month ago
gosub100|1 month ago
dr_|1 month ago
fancyfredbot|1 month ago
aorloff|1 month ago
rbanffy|1 month ago
And to whom.
enderforth|1 month ago
rbanffy|1 month ago
lijok|1 month ago
postexitus|1 month ago
vanderZwan|1 month ago
I have a friend who fell for one. He won the Dutch "Student of the Year" award in... I think 2006. When our then-minister of education proposed to make maths more popular in high school by dumbing down the curriculum, he organized a giant STEM activity day on a nation-wide scale to popularize it. We were both physics student at the time.
Anyway, as part of the award he was allowed to pick a conference to go to. He chose one in Spain. When he arrived it turned out he had fallen for an internet scam: the conference only existed as a scam website and the money had disappeared. He still had a nice weekend with his best buddy (now husband) though, and at least it didn't cost him anything.
LarsDu88|1 month ago
bsenftner|1 month ago
npilk|1 month ago
refuser|1 month ago
https://www.jpmorgan.com/about-us/events-conferences/health-...
(tfa is a fun read, regardless)
wilson090|1 month ago
Obscurity4340|1 month ago
sota_pop|1 month ago
buildbot|1 month ago
elevation|1 month ago
I can't comment on the authenticity of JPMHC. But it's interesting to think about who might benefit from creating a similar fake and observing how the world reacts to it. Will job candidates fraudulently list it on their resumes? If people publish articles claiming to have attended, what are their incentives? If you promote the conference ahead of time, will real researchers pitch talk ideas to you?
JamesGriffin|1 month ago
SOLAR_FIELDS|1 month ago
shevis|1 month ago
ttepasse|1 month ago
https://www.mysteryfleshpitnationalpark.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Flesh_Pit_National_Par...
melody_calling|1 month ago
bsenftner|1 month ago
jmugan|1 month ago
cyberpunk|1 month ago
Havoc|1 month ago
bix6|1 month ago
1vuio0pswjnm7|1 month ago
doctorpangloss|1 month ago
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abhishaike|1 month ago
fn_bb_sqr_pnts|1 month ago
abirch|1 month ago