By definition contrarian ideas are pretty harmless, since pursuing an idea in a society that disagrees with you is like pushing a boulder up a hill. The results

By definition contrarian ideas are pretty harmless, since pursuing an idea in a society that disagrees with you is like pushing a boulder up a hill. The results are also very hard to predict - sometimes you think about the weird behaviour of light and set the stage for the atomic bomb, and other times you start out making explosives for Nazi Germany and end up feeding the third world. Finally, they can be the product of their environment as much as a single intellect, as with Newton/Leibniz. For those reasons, which make genuinely contrarian ideas unpredictable and unstoppable, I think trying to prevent them is a bit of a red herring. Peter Thiel isn't like Haber or Einstein, because most of his potentially dangerous ideas are only contrarian in our little bubble. When he challenges democracy, he's on the side of millennia of kings and queens and emperors and chieftains, as well as everyone who has ever said "if I were king for a day..."; when he manages to be the highest profile Trump supporter in the tech world, he is backed by nearly half the voters in America; when he says that a monopoly is exactly what a company should aim for, a great many CEOs and HN readers privately nod. His genuinely contrarian ideas aren't frightening, they're considered laughable, which is why the media mocks him so much for seasteading and "vampirism".