A lot of people have been thinking about ways in which it might be good if the world *doesn't* go back to normal after the pandemic. Quite a few on my Twitter feed have thought in particular about mathematical interaction. Here are three examples. 1/ https://twitter.com/WanderingPoint/status/1252583232308117504?s=20

There are obvious benefits to online conferences and seminars, for example: less flying, fewer barriers to participation, more flexibility. But as some of these threads point out, some aspects of e.g. conferences are hard to replicate. 2/ https://twitter.com/MBarany/status/1252589900047753216?s=20

In particular, many people, including me, have hugely gained, especially when young, from relaxed informal interactions that take place between talks. I can remember one (with the late Ted Odell) that was life changing. 3/ https://twitter.com/AlexKontorovich/status/1248984610802937856?s=20

The recent and highly successful WAGON conference had "tables", where you could sign up for informal chat in small groups. From what @WanderingPoint writes, it sounds as though these were better than nothing, but a very imperfect substitute for informal in-person meetings. 4/

I'm not about to come up with a great new suggestion that solves this problem. Rather, I wanted to say a couple of things about the framing of the problem itself.

During discussions about whether we should all be flying less, I have sometimes heard the argument ... 5/

that it would be unfair on the younger generation. Those of us of a certain age have had all the benefits of those informal meetings, networking, etc., and now we want to pull the ladder up behind us?

But how unfair is it really? We had to struggle with snail mail, ... 6/

journal articles that you couldn't read without going to -- shock horror -- an actual physical library, a world where the only ways of finding out about some maths you didn't know were (i) talking to someone who might perhaps know about it or (ii) standing in front of a ... 7/

row of books in the library and trying to guess which one might have, somewhere, the information you needed, etc. etc. So the unfairness cuts both ways.

This leads me to my main question. Should we try to use the internet to replicate the good aspects ... 8/

of non-internet life as closely as possible? Or should we simply think about it as an amazing tool that we should try to use in the best way possible, in the expectation that there will be losses as well as gains, but in the hope that the gains will outweigh the losses? 9/

A simple example of a gain is maths Twitter. It has greatly enriched my life over the last year, and the way it has done so corresponds to precisely nothing from my pre-internet experience. (I do of course understand that Twitter has its problems. But ... 10/

it still illustrates my general point that losses of genuinely valuable aspects of mathematical life need to be set against potential gains of a completely different kind.)

I think it's an interesting challenge to come up with new ideas for how to exploit the internet ... 11/

to enhance informal mathematical communication. Here's one off the top of my head. No idea whether it would work well in practice, but I thought it would be good to have at least one example. It's to get together a panel of three or four experts in a subject and do a ... 12/

Reddit-style AMA (which stands for "ask me anything", as I assume most readers know, but maybe a few don't), intended for less established researchers, who could ask anything from fairly technical questions to more general career-advice questions. And the questions ... 13/

and answers could be there for people to read and profit from afterwards.

This would give a way for young researchers in an area to communicate informally with more established researchers. I imagine that it would be less good in some important ways than ... 14/

one-to-one conversations and better in others.

There must be lots of potential formats like this. We should be trying some of them out, to see what works and what doesn't. Then maybe when all this is over we can continue to pump less CO2 into the atmosphere. 15/15

PS @littmath has drawn my attention to some reflections of his on the WAGON conference, which are well worth reading. https://www.daniellitt.com/blog/2020/4/20/wagon-lessons-learned