your being tempted to be contrarian on questions suggests that you are the sort of person who is also tempted to be contrarian on answers
This is a “bad contrarian”, and if you suspect that as one of your reasons (I am fairly sure it is not), then the thing to do is not to worry about whether your view is contrarian, but to work on avoiding skewing your priors.
On the other hand, if after a lot of research, you happen to find yourself in opposition to what appears to be the mainstream view, i.e. being a “good contrarian”, then you should figure out whether you started with the same priors, and if so, carefully examine the steps that lead you to diverge from the mainstream, and look for an independent assessment of your logic and evidence for each step. What is probably not productive is to look back from the final divergent point of view and wonder whether holding a contrarian view is evidence against it being “correct”, then discontinuously switch your belief to that of a relevant group of experts, which is what Beckstead appears to be doing.
Hanson:
This is a “bad contrarian”, and if you suspect that as one of your reasons (I am fairly sure it is not), then the thing to do is not to worry about whether your view is contrarian, but to work on avoiding skewing your priors.
On the other hand, if after a lot of research, you happen to find yourself in opposition to what appears to be the mainstream view, i.e. being a “good contrarian”, then you should figure out whether you started with the same priors, and if so, carefully examine the steps that lead you to diverge from the mainstream, and look for an independent assessment of your logic and evidence for each step. What is probably not productive is to look back from the final divergent point of view and wonder whether holding a contrarian view is evidence against it being “correct”, then discontinuously switch your belief to that of a relevant group of experts, which is what Beckstead appears to be doing.