If we're interpreting what I wrote charitably, it's implicit that "obvious" facts will extremely rarely have hedging language, so the anti-hedging conversation

If we're interpreting what I wrote charitably, it's implicit that "obvious" facts will extremely rarely have hedging language, so the anti-hedging conversation can focus elsewhere. I _knew_ somebody was going to nitpick that phrase and rejected the urge to write a few extra paragraphs in the format of a HN comment expressing the idea more completely... If we want to look at it a bit less charitably though, even things that are true "as far as anyone has been able to prove" are usually not perceived to be true for a significant fraction of the human race, so in interactions with randos (like this current thread) it's still reasonable to assume that we're talking about opinions rather than facts. Even when talking about "facts" (as you partially defined them), the core idea still holds -- your _opinion_ (maybe a very well validated opinion) is that those facts are true, and hedging language is discourteous to the reader.