Also, conferences need to accept a decent number of papers so that people will show up and cover the costs of the meeting. Venues are usually booked long before the program is fixed.
Number of publications is a proxy for how much funding a professor can generate. Not much else.
> "Most papers are filler in retrospect" and "conferences need to accept a decent number of papers so that people will show up and cover the costs of the meeting"
None of these are conflicting. Conferences are often more about networking than the papers. Many paper are filler, but often only in retrospect. They are not obviously filler when presented.
That was not something I suggested. NIPS is very good conference, and a paper there is suggestive of quality work. Lots of past NIPS authors have been aqui-hired or regular-hired by Google and Facebook recently in their machine learning spending sprees, for example.
