Originally Posted By: TheFallibleFiend
so the implication is that if conformism is bad
Richard Feynman, the brilliant physicist, in his commencement address at CalTech related a story of a famous scientist whose published result turned out to be a little bit off. As he says,

"It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that."

Feynman knew that learning not to fool yourself was one of the hardest parts of becoming a scientist. Conformism is completelly symmetric to voluntaristic behavior from this perspective.