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People's distrust in science has led many scientists to take up arms (or at least keyboards) to defend their enterprise. But in their efforts to fight back against science denial, some scientists say things that just aren't true-and you can't build trust if the things you are saying are not trustworthy.

One popular move is to insist that science is right-full stop-and that once we discover the truth about the world, we are done. Or, as famous physicist Steven Smith said, "Even though a scientific theory is in a sense a social consensus (共识), it is unlike any other sort of consensus in that it is culture-free and permanent." Well, no. Even a modest familiarity with the history of science offers many examples of matters that scientists thought they had resolved, only to discover that they needed to be reconsidered.

Another popular move is to say scientific findings are true because scientists use "the scientific method." But we can never actually agree on what that method is. Some will say it is the observation and description of the world. Others will say it is the experimental method. Recently a prominent scientist claimed the scientific method was to avoid fooling oneself into thinking something is true that is not.

Each of these views has its merits, but if the claim is that any one of these is the scientific method, then they all fail. In point of fact, the methods of science have varied between disciplines and across time.

In my view, the biggest mistake scientists make is to claim that this is all somehow simple and therefore to imply that anyone who doesn't get it is stupid. Science is not simple, and neither is the natural world; therein lies the challenge of science communication. What we do is both hard and, often hard to explain. Our efforts to understand and characterize the natural world are just that: efforts. Because we're human, we often fall flat. The good news is that when that happens, we pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off, and get back to work.

Scientific theories are not perfect replicas of reality, but we have good reason to believe that they capture significant elements of it. And experience reminds us that when we ignore reality, it sooner or later comes back to bite us.