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Both for you and @Corvos, the thing is that scientists (this is in fact more true in the "hard sciences" than in History) don't generally think of theories in terms of "true" or "false" (or even "likely to be (...)"), but rather just as better/worse/incomparable, or often even just "more powerful" or "less powerful", models for generating predictions. A newer theory may be "more powerful" in that it generates more accurate predictions more often (but really, it will usually be the case that the newer theory does better than the older one in a few more contexts and worse than the older one in slightly fewer - "incomparable"), but also more finicky, in that it's harder to understand and apply correctly, and therefore inferior for a particular situation. Physicists will boldly use Newtonian physics to calculate the behaviour of slow heavy objects on Earth, and not mention anything about newer theories to any 6th graders they are tasked with teaching, without feeling like they are lying to anyone.
The psychology here is really more akin to if you ask an engineer for the best plane, no further instructions provided, and get a modern Airbus rather than an SR-71 Blackbird. The engineer might even in his professional context feel strongly that the SR-71 and YF-12 constituted the pinnacle of aviation engineering, and argue passionately about the particular design tradeoffs between the two, but he will not for a moment feel like he deceived you or betrayed his professional oaths by furnishing you with neither; they are simply not planes that it is reasonable for you to deploy or fly, and it is exceedingly unlikely that they will be actually better suited for your use case, whatever it is, than the boring reliable airliner that can even occasionally survive Indonesian airport infrastructure. Now, if you are a plane buff, have a cold war spy mission to run or happen to be an activist who spends every waking hour malding about the mothballing of the Concorde, you would probably feel a terrible sense of betrayal about this, but as someone who is not, would you think the engineer deserves condemnation?
I am a scientist. Newspaper articles have been written on my work, albeit ones over which I had little control; I have read them and I have sighed over their inaccuracies. I am well aware of what you meant, as I suspect is @RenOS.
I am telling you as a scientist that it’s really easy to use this reasoning to work yourself into some very shady places. Reaching its nadir when you start musing happily about how all the lay people don’t really understand how these things are done…
It’s precisely because it’s partly true that it’s so fucking seductive.
Well, same(ish) - I have not been featured in the news (nor is it likely to happen anytime soon given that I am in unfashionable theoretical CS), but then on the other hand I count some actual historians among my relatives so I have some inside view of that sausage factory. I think the main difference to me is that the thing you describe as a nadir does not feel particularly bad to me, on its own. The educator part of the job has always felt fundamentally adversarial to me - even well-selected students will at any point in time use 95% of their galaxy brains (or, well, of whatever fraction of those they are willing to invest in your course at all) only to engage in mental gymnastics to convince themselves that they are perfect just as they are, and to convince you that they learned and applied what you wanted them to without them actually having done those things. (The sheer inventiveness I've seen in schemes to circumvent automated plagiarism detectors in programming assignments that could be done with a fraction of the effort, or to hide transparently false lemmas in the bowels of a Rube Goldberg proof of a three-liner that was covered in class!)
To teach these students - not an anonymous public, and not on a topic of any political valence, but people you know and a subset of whom you hope to elevate to colleagues some day! - requires constant subterfuge and deception to get past the ego defenses of their monkey brains. That you would do all that and more when actually just talking to normies seems absolutely par for the course for me. It's not like I'm not bothered by the politically motivated deception cases @RenOS was hinting at, but there I see the problem somewhere else. It is only really bad if, before deciding to deceive the public, these scientists have already deceived themselves, or otherwise transgressed against the mental discipline that a scientist needs for science as a whole to function in the long run. (Many cases of this don't even involve politics, cf. every case of trash stats replication crisis just-so story zingers. I blame the general culture in US academia where idealism about science qua science is seen as cringe and unbefitting of a successful working adult.) If it were as he says, and these people indeed merely advanced their agenda when talking to the general public but treated evidence fairly while engaging in the scientific process, I would perhaps find them tasteless as politicians, but not compromised as scientists.
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