notes-onlyListenToThingsThatPeopleWantToSay

There are at least three ways that speeches and written texts come to be:

(1) Someone has something they really want to say, so they find a forum that will let them speak or publish something.

(2) Someone needs or wants publicity for their project or for themself, and so they set themselves a goal to give lots of speeches or writing lots of stuff that gets published.

(3) Someone is tasked with helping to organize a conference or journal or book, and they have to find some people to speak at it/write stuff for it in order to draw an audience, so they ask prominent people to contribute a talk or an article or a chapter.

My advice is to only spend your time listening or reading to case (1), unless you have some other reason to think that the content is good.

With case (1), if someone has something they're burning to say, then they're thinking about it a lot, and in addition the topic seems important or interesting to them.

With case (2), people have a need to be seen to be saying something even if it's not really worth listening to/reading. With case (3), often people feel like they have provide something as a favor to the conference organizers or the editors, even if they can't think of anything that's really worth listening to/reading.

It can be hard to distinguish (1) from (2); one way is to look at the regularity with which people are generating new material. The more regular, the more suspect that it's (2). Is someone posting on their blog every day? They probably made it their goal to write lots of blog posts. Is a young professor publishing a bunch of journal articles? They need to get tenure.

Distinguishing (1)/(2) from (3) is easier. At a conference, watch out for plenary sessions with a notable person talking, or for roundtable discussions between notable people. Often both conferences and journals helpfully signpost 'Invited speaker"s and "Invited articles". In books, watch out for books that are compilations of chapters each written by different people. In a course at university, watch out for a course with lots of 'guest speakers'.

Please note that (2) and (3) don't mean that the material is necessarily lousy; the person might happen to have something quite good to say even if they have other motives. It's the other way around; (2) and (3) don't give you any information either way, but (1) is evidence that the content might be better than average.