It's easy to think of being serious and having fun as opposite sides of a spectrum. The problem is that 'being serious' has many unrelated meanings, for example:
- Serious as in somber or solemn. "This is a serious event, stop playing around."
- Serious as in actually trying to attain your goals, as opposed to just going through the motions. "This is a serious effort."
Only the first meaning is actually opposed to fun. Fun/playful vs somber/solemn.
The second meaning is on a totally orthogonal axis. Something like superficial/purfunctory/haphazard vs substantive/engaged/purposeful.
You can be solemn and superficial, as in Adam Mastroianni's account of shallow science:
I wanted to get up and yell: "EITHER THIS IS THE MOST POTENT PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERVENTION EVER, OR THIS STUDY IS TOTAL BULLSHIT."
If those results are real, we should start a nationwide backslapping campaign immediately. We should be backslapping astronauts before their rocket launches and Olympians before their floor routines. We should be running followup studies to see just how many SAT points we can get - does a second slap get you another 500? Or just another 250? Can you slap someone raw and turn them into a genius?
Or - much more likely - the results are not real, and we should either be a) helping this person understand where they screwed up in their methods and data analysis, or b) kicking them out for fraud.
Those are the options. Asking a bunch of softball questions ("Which result was your favorite?") is not a reasonable response. That's like watching someone pull a rabbit out of a hat actually for real, not a magic trick, and then asking them, "What's the rabbit's name?"
And you can be serious and playful, like Janja Garnbret's obsession with having fun training while she utterly dominates the sport.
A useful model for creativity is that generating ideas and judging ideas are separate processes.
Experiences like writers block can be caused by the judging side being too strong, so that ideas are strangled before they can develop. Many creative exercises, like brainstorming, have rules about avoiding or delaying judgement to prevent this excessive self-censorship.
The fun/playful <-> somber/solumn axis is in part about risk and consequences. Being playful signals that we are relaxing our judginess and that this is a good time to experiment. Like dogs play bowing to promise they won't bite too hard.
A playful environment encourages curiosity, and exploring rather than exploiting.
So there is a reason that HYTRADBOI has a silly name and a 90s dreamweaver aesthetic. And it's not just because I have the design skills of a 5 year old with a box of crayons.
Giving a conference talk can feel like standing in front a jury. You could boost or sink your career in a few minutes. It feels serious.
But a conference that is a bit silly is a conference where your talk doesn't have to be perfect, where you can be creative and experimental and curious. Where you don't have to pretend that your ideas and works are perfect, so that we can talk about tradeoffs and challenges instead of trading sales pitches.
Besides, you can't go around wearing solumn-serious face 24/7. It's bad for your soul. Seriously.