A “Feynman story” is “any anecdote that someone tells that is structured so that the teller comes off as a genius and everyone else in the story comes off as an idiot.

“[Many people] seemed to think Feynman was a great guy…. [many] other people didn’t think he was so great. So Feynman seems like a standard case of a guy who was nice to some people and a jerk to others.”

Also:

Feynman couldn’t see the value of something like sociology because intellectually he was prone to extreme scientism – to the view that forms of knowledge that can’t be pursued exclusively via the methods of the natural sciences aren’t real knowledge. The ironic paradox here is that someone who has any grasp of the sociology of knowledge would immediately recognize that this idea – a very common one in our contemporary intellectual culture – is false, and in a very socially pernicious way, as can be seen in contemporary attempts to defund the humanities and social sciences.

Richard Feynman was a brilliant physicist, raconteur, teacher and popularizer. But he was only human.

Lawyers, Guns & Money: Feynman, pedagogy, and the two cultures -