Thanks for sharing your seminar @paoladm! 
I like the collection of quotes you included from Feyerabend and Feynman
A few thoughts:
- Defining independent researchers: often mentioned in anecdotes (and on wiki), but I agree there isn’t much research describing independent researchers and what they do. @arika.virapongse and I have collected some references (available here) as part of project looking at organizations that support indies: Ron Gross’s book The Independent Scholar’s Handbook may be useful (the first edition is from 1983 but it still seems quite relevant, the author actually attended the SVS last year!).
- History of errors: the book Failure: Why Science Is So Successful may be relevant (I haven’t read it, but heard the author speak about it on the Night Science podcast)
- Feyerabend: I think this Nature commentary from 1987 did actually call Feyerabend ‘the worst enemy of science’ before Horgan’s article in the Scientific American (although the article also discussed if Popper, Lakatos, and Kuhn were all ‘betrayers of the truth’ alongside Feyerabend). Relatedly, Horgan recently republished the interesting profiles he did on Kuhn, Popper and Feyerabend.
- Mixed methods: reminded me of this article The data revolution in social science needs qualitative research | Nature Human Behaviour. I was trained in, and have mostly always used, quantitive approaches but agree that mixed/qualitative methods are undervalued and likely to be important for many of the questions that metascience aims to address.
- Preregistration: I think it will be possible but difficult to make these dynamic/evolutionary, but I am also not sure that this is a big problem as they are intended for confirmatory research. This article is relevant Preregistration of exploratory research: Learning from the golden age of discovery | PLOS Biology. My feeling is that it would be better to have research plans/proposals which specified general directions and aims for exploration (which would often be similar to grants), rather than specific experiments/analyses, as a separate type of research artefact (i.e. RIO publishes grants and research ideas). That said, I’m not sure if having such plans would actually constrain the research degrees of freedom in exploratory research in a similarly useful way as preregistrations do for confirmatory research.
- [Edit] Enlightened science: I forgot to add that I fully support your last point of doing science in service of society/humanity. I have recently been reading Nicholas Maxwell’s work which is relevant to this and am surprised that his ideas aren’t more widely known (well, his books are very dry, so that is one reason). I would also be happy to hear about other perspectives on this as I am sure there are many.
I would be happy to contribute to further discussion about how to develop these ideas and related educational material.