They already are connected to other researchers
I think part of it is that networking is relatively hits-based: Most new connections don’t make much difference, but meeting someone who is a good fit for collaboration or who gives you access to an opportunity can be really valuable. I don’t think most researchers have hit diminishing returns on networking yet. Even if you already know 200 people in the field, getting to know 10 more out of which one is an “impactful connection” can make a big difference. For me it has also often made a difference to meet someone I already know again and get to know them better, and that ended up making a big difference for me.
or can easily connect to them
I think it’s actually (relatively) hard to connect to people even if you have a decent network. If you want to meet someone new you can get an intro and then have a call with them, but I think there is a lot of friction to that, and it feels like you need a reason to do so. Meeting people at an event has a lot less “social overhead”. If you want to talk to someone you just walk over and see how it goes, and if it’s not productive you walk off again.
especially with a lot of junior people (who might have a lot of terrible/obvious ideas)
I’m not sure if “finding it useless to talk to junior people who have terrible or obvious ideas” is a problem people have? I didn’t find anyone at the retreat “too junior” to be interesting to talk to (even though with different people the conversational dynamic would be more skewed towards me giving vs receiving advice depending on the other’s experience level, but that seems fine to me). And if someone does find it uninteresting to talk to someone with less experience, they can still just end the conversation. Actually we had an explicit norm that it is perfectly okay to end conversations or leave sessions if you don’t think they are the best use of your time at the moment.
Epistemic standards: We encouraged people to
notice confusion, ask dumb questions and encourage others when they ask questions (to decrease deferring of the type “This doesn’t make sense to me but the other person seems so confident so it must be true”)
regularly think about solving the whole problem (to keep the big picture in mind and stay on track)
reflect on their experience. We had a reflection time each morning with a sheet to fill out which had prompts like “what are key confusions I would like to resolve” “What is my priority for today” etc
Content Quality: It depends on what you mean by content quality, but I think having a high bar for session content can actually be a bit detrimental. For example one of the sessions I learned most from wasn’t “high quality”—the person wasn’t an expert and also hadn’t prepared a polished presentation. But they knew more than I did and because the group was small I could just ask them lots of questions and learn a lot that way.
We also encouraged people to leave sessions when they don’t find them the best use of their time in order to ensure that people only listen to content they find valuable. We got the feedback that people found that norm really helpful.