Why lectures do not work

I am of two minds about this.

On the one hand, I think lectures matter. Often I can't understand a paper until after I've heard a lecture on the subject. This is particularly true in logic as a lot of the papers are written in greek letters (seriously). The lecture includes the words that give meaning to the symbols. The symbols are rarely fully explained in a papers (e.g. what is Gamma?) since they assume the reader already knows and they have a limited amount of page space.

On the other hand, I took a course from John White where we were given a few dozen papers. Each person was assigned a paper to present for 20 minutes but we were all required to read all the papers. It was an amazingly productive class and I learned a lot.

Lectures and textbooks are where papers go to die. Papers are where ideas have their funerals. Conferences are where papers get their all-too-short life. In order to get to the leading edge of a subject you have to start with the lectures and textbooks, read the recent papers, attend the conferences, and then create a presentation.

Universities are basically the "shopping mall" of ideas. Lectures are the sales talk of ideas. Not everybody buys the product but you can't expect people to read a textbook (e.g. calculus) without the sales pitch (the lecture). So I think lectures matter as a "natural selection" mechanism to find people who will go further in a subject.