Contrarianism as a Proxy for Agency

Peter Thiel praises contrarianism why? There may be plenty of reasons to bet on contrarians besides, e.g. unpopular hypotheses may be under priced in the market, or under-explored relative to their intrinsic promise. What is it that contrarianism is it if anything that contrarianism has to do with competence? My hypothesis is that it is a useful proxy for agency; that is that those who are willing to put themselves out there as disagreeing with common wisdom are demonstrating some degree of agency by being willing to and having actually done that.

There are a lot more potential contrarians than contrarians, there are pressures and good reasons to not publicly be a contrarian about something you privately (and perhaps weakly) think. Social pressures mostly but also things like lacking the confidence in or courage of your convictions, or simply not bothering to pipe up. Being contrarian entails putting a higher priority on doing what you want to do over taking the easy path and caving to social pressures. You could be contrarian without these things but people tend not be.

It is something that you can in-fact just do but the proof is in the pudding of being able and willing to actually do it to go outside of your comfort zone to take whatever social consequences and discomfort are associated with it and publicly hold a view outside of common wisdom or even the overtone window. And we could probably do with more of them too, you get more information from samples that are less correlated to common causes i.e. the social pressures, shared information sources, common patterns of information processing etc.. And precisely because of that a lot of the time contrarian opinions can be taken to be more likely to be correct that is so long as they are come about honestly so to speak.

But it being something you can "just do" presents a problem for it as a proxy for that very reason, whiles simultaneously undermining the informational content. Goodhart's law strikes again what we are looking for for purposes of confidence is not contrarianism as such but contrarianism as a canary for someone being the sort that "just does things" like being contrarian. You can do contrarianism quite easily for signaling purposes without adopting the characteristics of mind and action associated with the agency that it is taken to signal.