conference - Should the slides in a presentation be self-explanatory or be as minimal as possible?

When you do a research presentation, what is usually the focus that you take.

Some professors tell me to make the slides as self explanatory as possible, and I quote:

Someone should be able to understand your slides without you being there

To me, this approach seems counter intuitive to the principle of a "talk". After all, you already wrote a paper that meets that objective.

Other people, for example in things like TED talks or (please bear with me) presentations by Apple, have very bare bones slides, where they only focus on transmitting the main message of the talk.

What is your take, should the presentation be made as didactic as possible or just a cold transference of information?

Answer

I would say the two most important points are to make slides you are comfortable with and not to limit your oral presentation to reading your slides.

Furthermore, if you are presenting a research paper, i.e., where more written material is available to the audience, then the objective is usually to make people want to read your paper, instead of explaining the entire paper in 20 minutes.

Some people prefer to have full slides, arguing that when members of the audience are not understanding English very well, it can help them to have both the oral presentation and the slides, especially when the speaker does not speak a perfect English. It is also helpful for members of the audience who got distracted at some point, and who can quickly read where the speaker is. Other people prefer minimal slides, arguing that having both the full text and the oral presentation might confuse the audience. In particular, whenever a slide is displayed, the audience tends to read it immediately, and during the reading, to be less receptive of any spoken words.

In other words, the only "bad" presentation would be to have full slides, and to limit your presentation to reading them, because you become basically useless. However, you can have long slides, as long as you consider them as an aid for the audience who haven't followed what you said (for whatever reason), and not as your script to read. You can also minimal slides, containing only the key points. In the end, you need to be comfortable with your slides, and to give a presentation like one you would like to attend.