Doug Helmreich writes:

I’m working my way through James Gleick’s Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman and I was struck by this passage (p. 305) (bolding mine)

Later, experimenters at Caltech felt that Feynman’s very presence exerted a sort of moral pressure on their findings and methods. He was mercilessly skeptical. He loved to talk about the famous oil-drop experiment of Caltech’s first great physicist Robert Millikan, which revealed the indivisible unit charge of the electron by isolating it in tiny, floating oil drops. The experiment was right but some of the numbers were wrong—and the record of subsequent experimenters stood as a permanent embarrassment to physics. They did not cluster around the correct result; rather, they slowly closed in on it. Millikan’s error exerted a psychological pull, like a distant magnet forcing their observations off center. If a Caltech experimenter told Feynman about a result reached after a complex process of correcting data, Feynman was sure to ask how the experimenter had decided when to stop correcting, and whether that decision had been made before the experimenter could see what effect it would have on the outcome. It was all too easy to fall into the trap of correcting until the answer looked right. To avoid it required an intimate acquaintanceship with the rules of the scientist’s game. It also required not just honesty, but a sense that honesty required exertion.”

I also found this:

Interestingly Millikan’s value for the viscosity of air was incorrect by a small amount, and so his deduced value for the elementary charge was also slightly out. It took a surprisingly long time before these small errors were corrected. Everyone who obtained a value slightly different from Millikan seems to have found reasons to correct it incorrectly. This is a warning, remember that the “correct” value may not in fact be correct, even if it has been peer-reviewed and published in the primary literature.

I’m struck by Feynman’s early recognition of what I’d call a potential garden of forking paths, or the danger of letting the result drive the method.

I replied that it’s also interesting how much simpler the world was back then. There were many fewer examples to talk about. There was the oil-drop experiment, and Mendel’s data, and N-rays, and whatever Kepler did, and. . . that was about it!

There’s just so much more of everything available to us now. More music, more literature, more movies, more history, more stories of all sorts, including many more science examples of all sorts. One thing I remember from Feynman’s memoir was that, when he went to a talk, he had a few examples in his head, and whatever idea was presented in the talk, he’d run it through these examples and see if it made sense. I do that too! I just have thousands of examples crowding around in there. I’m not putting myself above Feynman here–for one thing, I’m pretty sure that all my examples are mathematically trivial compared to any of his–it’s more just a change in our culture, that a lot more stories are in our collective memory.

Helmreich responded:

And the theory was ahead of the measurement, so you’d have all sorts of papers predicting the outcome of an experiment if only it could be conducted…. Vs now, the data is the theory. I’m not slamming inductive work, and in fact Feynman himself was criticized for intuiting results and then deriving theory to fit his intuition.

I also pointed Helmreich to my article with Megan Higgs on interrogating the “cargo cult science” metaphor, to which Helmreich responded:

I think your critique of the metaphor is apt (except for unrepentant advocates of regression discontinuity; that’s a cargo cult). I prefer a maxim from Neal Stephenson’s book ‘Anathem’ — wanting something to be true does not make it true. And yet from that mistaken belief so much ‘bad’ science comes, from shamefully intentional to unfortunately unintentional.

I’m just glad Feynman didn’t tell a story about rowing a boat in China . . .

And at that point I just had to point him to my movie synopsis, Don’t Call Me Shirley, Mr. Feynman!