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> Look at the Millikan measurement of the electron and how in created confirmation bias and an anchoring effect on some property

Could you elaborate on this please?

But yes, the underlying argument is sound: extracting facts from the messy phenomenological reports about the world is extremely difficult, and cannot be done by simply taking a brain in a jar and having it think extremely hard.

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Incorrect calculation led to some wrong value, I think electric charge. Subsequent findings showed a general trend towards a correct value. The general trend indicates that findings that were too far off were scared to be published for being wrong and contradicting existing studies, thus only small refinements were published, causing the slow drift.

Thus, the first well accepted study anchors a value and it takes much more work to get a new value established as correct after the anchor is set. Especially in a case where the experiment design itself is still solid and it was more with specific experiment (measurements slightly off, other values not quite correct).

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