By Kino Zhao
In 2022, the APA announced its pilot 2+1 virtual conference program, stating “the three APA divisions have agreed to conduct a three-year experiment with a rotating schedule of two in-person divisional meetings and one virtual divisional meeting per year, beginning in 2025.”
In 2025, the Central Division hosted the first virtual APA. As expected, a default level of skepticism over virtual conferences plus technical difficulties associated with inexperience translated into comparably low attendance. Still, I remember being impressed that it was quite well run as a first attempt.
My own view on the merits of virtual conferences has changed over the following year, and I have spoken out in support of the 2+1 experiment. In preparation for the 2026 Pacific Division iteration of the experiment, the Program Chair Colin Marshall invited me to contribute to an APA Blog Series aimed at persuading fellow philosophers to give virtual conferences another chance.
My Blog Post was published on January 13th, 2026. On the same day, the APA announced that it would terminate the three-year experiment early.
There are many things I want to say about this, but I will limit myself to three things.
First, it is absolutely wild to me that any serious organization would terminate a three-year experiment with only one year’s worth of data. This isn’t even to mention the fact that the first year is always a learning year. The format is new. (At least, the intentional design of the online APA is new, building on experience from the crisis designs of conferences during the COVID shutdowns.) The platform is new. The organizers are new. The attendees are new. As the first step towards kickstarting a new project, it is absolutely priceless. As data that can project onto future performance, it is absolutely useless.
But suppose, by some miracle, the first year is as good as it will ever get, there is still no epistemically justifiable reason to cut the experiment short. A three-year experiment is already on the short side for drawing inferences – it generates only three data points. Having only gathered one and a half data points (with submission numbers but not attendance numbers for the Pacific) is plainly inadequate even for a pilot program.
Second, the fact that the APA executive committee can simply decide to cut short a three-year commitment on short notice and without public consultation with the APA membership seems incongruous with the history of interaction between the governing body and the APA community. I was not part of the initial deliberation that led to the 2+1 experiment, but I understand that Philosophers of Sustainability launched a petition for the pilot program, gathering over 700 signatures from APA members, which the APA cites as a main motivation for taking the demand seriously. Why, then, should the committee have subsequently chosen to reverse their decision so quickly and without public deliberation?
I am not involved in APA governance, and so perhaps the internal process of deliberation was more complex than the public announcements suggest. What I do know is that the APA Blog Series on the Pacific virtual conference began in November of 2025. One might think it would be prudent for the APA to take notice of the ongoing push initiated by its own Program Chair to support a project it is deciding to terminate and, I don’t know, give us a heads up.
Third, as a member at large, the way in which the APA seems to be reasoning about the virtual conference issue troubles me. According to the termination announcement, the reason for concluding the experiment early is as follows:
“The process of organizing an online meeting is more challenging for the program committee than organizing an in-person meeting, online meetings are more taxing on APA staff, and the technology for large online meetings is often difficult for participants to navigate. And perhaps most telling, participant feedback on the Central Division meeting indicates that while many people appreciate that the online format may be more accessible for some people, a large number report that they personally would not participate in another online meeting.”
A couple of paragraphs later, the announcement continues:
“The divisions and the board of officers recognize that the motivations for initiating the 2+1 experiment—primarily climate impact and accessibility—remain, and the APA will continue to pursue those goals in other ways.”
It seems to me that the reasoning is as follows: we understand that there are people who can only attend online conferences. However, because many people who can attend in-person conferences will not attend online conferences, we have decided to disregard the request of people who can only attend online conferences.
Set aside the problematic populism implicit in this reasoning. As far as I can tell, the original motivations for starting the 2+1 experiment were not the (false) impression that most people who can attend in-person conferences prefer online conferences. Instead, it was (1) accessibility, or the consideration of those who can only attend online conferences, and (2) climate conscientiousness, or the normative judgment that those who can attend in-person conferences ought to do it less often. Neither of these motivations was addressed by the APA’s rationale for terminating the experiment.
Finally, it is worth stressing the point that we currently have little evidence that suggests that the claims expressed in the rationale actually reflect common attitudes in the membership at large. The claim that people who can attend in-person conferences will not attend online conferences comes from a survey sent to those who have registered at the virtual Central Division meeting. By APA’s own light, there weren’t that many people registering. That is, by APA’s own light, an overall small number of people from our community (who may very well change their minds) expressed unwillingness to attend another online conference on a survey following the first installment of an online conference. To put any weight on that seems epistemically irresponsible to me.
According to Colin Marshall, the virtual Pacific APA received about 800 registrations, in comparison to about 1100 people that came to the last in-person Pacific APA. That does not seem to be a big discrepancy to me. Anecdotally, one speaker in a session I attended at the virtual Pacific APA began his talk by stating that he would not have been able to go to any APA if it wasn’t for the online format, while another speaker zoomed in from a different continent. If we surveyed them, they would probably state an unwillingness to attend in-person APAs. I hope no one takes that as evidence that we should stop hosting in-person conferences.
At the end of the day, I am only a member. I have never been involved in APA governance and I can only imagine how difficult it must be to make an organization like the APA function. At the same time, I also think it’s important for a regular member to share a perspective. I am deeply impressed by both the amount and the quality of work the APA virtual conference teams, at both Central and Pacific, have put in to make this experiment work. It is truly disappointing to see the dedication and ingenuity behind the first two online APA meetings get squandered.
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