My suggestion here would be to think about the purpose of the conversation. The goal of cocktail party conversations is not to create working solutions to real world engineering problems. It is to create connections between people, and to have fun. Speculative but uninformed discussions about hard problems are indeed useful if they fulfil this goal. Let's face it, if all the "amateurs" in the room had enough insight to produce workable solutions, it would still be a "useless" conversation on a practical level because those people, working in unrelated fields, do not have the means or the opportunity to put their theories into practice.
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My suggestion here would be to think about the purpose of the conversation. The goal of cocktail party conversations is not to create working solutions to real world engineering problems. It is to create connections between people, and to have fun. Speculative but uninformed discussions about hard problems are indeed useful if they fulfil this goal. Let's face it, if all the "amateurs" in the room had enough insight to produce workable solutions, it would still be a "useless" conversation on a practical level because those people, working in unrelated fields, do not have the means or the opportunity to put their theories into practice.
Oh I enjoy bullshitting as much as the next person, I get bothered mostly when people genuinely don't think that's what we're doing.
But yeah, I'm able to mostly suppress this feeling and live my life, but it's really annoying, to me, when people take themselves too seriously.