Some thoughts regarding the @geosociety decision to cut alcohol from oral/poster presentation sessions (a thread):

I'm a beer drinker. I'm a homebrewer. I like...no, love...beer. That said, I'm completely OK with this decision, and hope other professional organizations follow suit.

Note it is NOT a blanket ban on alcohol at GSA meetings...just a decision to not serve alcohol at poster and presentation sessions. These are professional settings in all senses of the word, where people are presenting research.

Look, I love to have a beer while jawing about fossils, but I'm honestly OK w/saving that for after the presentations. If it creates a better environment for everyone, let's do it. There's plenty of time to drink otherwise, w/o being the sad drunk staggering around the posters.

Now some of you will say (and I used to think) "If we don't have beer at poster sessions, nobody will come!" That's bull.

People don't come to poster sessions because the poster sessions often are A) stuck in some distant room B) at the end of the day when everyone is worn out from hours of bad talks, & C) too many people send (or believe) the message that work on posters is second class research.

A) is hard to manage, so whatever; B) can be fixed by scheduling (put poster sessions in the late morning, for instance); and...

C) we need to recalibrate & quit slagging on posters (think back to the SVP "Good Old Days" before double-blind review when an R1 affiliation was all that was required to take the stage, leading to many bad examples of scientific communication for shoddy research).

So yeah, let's keep beer at conferences in moderation, but for presentations in any form, I'm OK without.
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