What utter pretense. It's you who's the contrarian. People like you have no idea what Taleb does, and how wildly successful he has managed to be at what all other feeble intellectuals fail at. He is the 'level above'. Generally speaking people who say this don't really know what they're doing and we can safely ignore them.
We should adjust our priors against you much before Taleb. I doubt you are capable to judge good "ideas". When Kahneman himself says Taleb changed his views, that's the guy. Not the other way around. So who's the "contrarian?"
I fail to see in any way how Taleeb could be considered such a genius. His ideas are often a banalization of themes from Bayesian inference (the black swan thing) or glut of diverse ideas under a wrong description (the anti-fragility thing).
You cannot even say that he proves his worth as an investor: Warren Buffet, say, is much better at investing but he says saner things.
"Kahneman says" is just argument from authority, and it surprises me that someone can still believe for it to be effective here.
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?