The easiest way to filter out 99 percent of this is to ignore anything that has no impact on your life (ie doesn't pay rent). Most of the people you could be listening to aren't profitable, but also won't lead you astray: you'll just go on the same regardless. In the final percentage point there are still a lot of confusing opinions that various smart people have, in regards to diet, morality, education, exchethera, but at that point I think it's usually more productive to cross reference the specific opinions rather than look at people as contrarians or not. If you can't cross-check a belief either through reference to other sources, or through your own studies or experience, then it probably isn't relevant one way or the other.
The easiest way to filter out 99 percent of this is to ignore anything that has no impact on your life (ie doesn't pay rent).
Eh? If I was renting, I think that would have an impact on my life -- so maybe this is yet another metaphor I never heard of.
If everyone was processing reality to the best of their analytical (and other) abilities, and honestly passing on the conclusions they reach then virtuosity at recognizing rational fallacies would go a lot further than I think it actually does; I'm afraid much of what we need is a social understanding of ot...
The recent discussion on neo-reactionary-ism brought out some references to (intellectual hipsters and) meta-contrarianism linking to a 2010 posting by Yvain.
For some time I've been thinking about "narcissistic contrarians" -- those who make an art form of their exotically counterintuitive belief systems, who combine positions not normally met in the same person. There can be good reasons for being a contrarian. If you're looking for a scarce resource, it may help to not look where everyone else is looking, hence contrarian stock market investors may do very well, if they actually see something others don't; same with oil explorers. Less creditably, I believe Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise made reference to the way a novice pundit or prognosticator may have nothing to gain by saying anything like what other people are saying, and much to gain, in taking some wild extravagant position or prediction if it happens to attract an audience others have ignored, or if the predictions happens to be right.
The Narcissistic Contrarian is much like the Intellectual Hipster, but more extreme. The Intellectual Hipster usually stakes out a few unusual or incongruous positions, to create an identity that stands out from the crowd. The Narcissistic Contrarian is constantly dazzling her fans. Something written by Camille Paglia made me think of the idea in the first place. Nicholas Taleb is another suspect although I think he started out with some good ideas. If she/he manages to get a fan-base, they are apt to be pretty worshipful -- they can't imagine being able to come up with such a wild set of insights. The contrarianism is for its own sake rather than an attempt to find and settle on some previously undiscovered thing, so it particularly likely to lead people astray, into unproductive avenues of thought.
Does anyone else think this is a real and useful distinction?