[dstyrb]

That's interesting. To me an overconfident presentation / paper is a huge red flag and I start to look even more carefully for things that are elided or brushed under the rug. In the PhD we would have rip sessions, where we take new publications from big names and just rip the analysis to shreds (with some post doc help)-- it was an important lesson on "no experiment is anywhere near perfect."

I vastly prefer presentations and articles where both sides of an argument are presented. "We are in agreement with camp A, however camp B using procedure 2 find ... in the future experiment X will help solve this discrepancy"

My impression of scientific presentations to the community is that it's mostly about _funding_. So they are want to make as bold a statement as possible then -- but then "these stars may have actually come from another galaxy!" turns into "Scientists find alien stars visiting the Milky Way from Andromeda!" I actually remember a group issuing a counter press release to their own press release when some reporter completely misinterpreted something and all of a sudden bbc news was reporting that the sun was from the Sagittarius galaxy.