I'll admit it: I'm a sucker for contrarians. It's great to have a bunch of knowledge, but it's always the stuff you don't know, the stuff that contradicts your common sense, that kills you. That’s what contrarians are great for—drawing out the "unknown unknowns" that wreak havoc on life. 

Finding Black Swans

Unknown unknowns work like this: you're sitting there putting money in your 401k, thinking, "This capitalism thing is pretty swell," and then BAM! It's gone!

Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls these unknowns "Black Swans," because people used to think there was no such thing as a black swan—until the first black swan was found. You can bet that people took notice when the first black swan was discovered, because it overturned hundreds of years of common knowledge (and might have even posed a threat!).

Our brains are wired to pick out things that don't fit the pattern. Brainteasers that ask you to find one item that doesn't fit are much easier than puzzles that ask you to find a handful of related items, for example. It's like seeing the venomous snake in an otherwise soothing line of trees.

Linguists have even speculated that this is why we have accents and dialects. People in a village or town often help one another freely, knowing that the favors will be returned eventually. But when an outsider arrives asking for help, his accent will immediately mark him as a potential freeloader who is unlikely to return favors.

Silly Rabbit, Contrary's for Kids!

With our innate desire to spot the contrary, you can see why Sesame Street regularly played a song called "one of these things is not like the other ones" or its variant, "3 of these things." (It would have been great if the non-matching item always turned out to be poisonous or explosive or "stranger danger," but I suppose we can cut them some slack.)

It's common sense that counterintuitive blog posts get more page views. So, why am I even talking about such an obvious topic?

The truth is, I've been intending to talk about it ever since Paul Krugman published an article excoriating the SuperFreaknonomics authors for being (you guessed it) too contrarian. In it, Krugman argued that Levitt and Dubner had “fallen into the trap of counterintuitiveness…[trying to] distinguish themselves by shocking the bourgeoisie.”  By attacking contrarians, he was mostly just pandering for pageviews, but people still took him seriously.

At that point, I decided  to stick up for the status quo.  What would the world be like if we silenced the contrarians?  A lot less interesting and a lot more dangerous, if you ask me!

Killing a Black Swan

That said, maybe there’s a right way to be contra-contrarian. Check out how Larry David does it. Black swans can get you in big trouble if you don't see them coming; Larry proves you can get into bigger trouble if you see one coming and accidentally kill it.

So what do you think? Should we silence the contrarians among us? Or even better, have you seen any really good counterintuitive news lately?