This doesn’t address my question about how to rationally think about conflicts of interest.
Well, there’s a good chance that most people who present technical information publicly are probably involved somewhere in the tech space.
Seems like a bad assumption. Do you trust a scientist paid by BP to tell you how safe BP fuel is for the environment? Do you trust Mark Zuckerberg to tell the United States how private Facebook is?
And after you employ some critical thinking there, maybe your responses will dictate how you would see the presentation of statistics, and whether a dishonest paid actor would be likely to overstate things that make their employer look good and understate things that made their employer look bad, while technically not lying as far as the law is concerned.