Your career will be damaged if you question the efficacy of the flu shot, because it is current medical doctrine. This kind of thing has happened lots of times

Your career will be damaged if you question the efficacy of the flu shot, because it is current medical doctrine. This kind of thing has happened lots of times before, as the Atlantic article points out. Yes, it's obviously true that anyone going stubbornly against established consensus will get in hot water. This is the case whether their position is correct or incorrect. In the first case, they're heroes; in the latter case, they're crackpots. It's rarely obvious to people outside the field which is which, and there's a lot more of the latter. The contrarianism that I object to is when people who don't have enough expertise in the field to tell good ideas from bad seem to hold up going against consensus as somehow inherently noble, because most of the time they're just going to be encouraging the crackpots. This especially includes anything that glorifies the Galileo-esque "persecuted genius" archetype. You're treading dangerously close to an argument from authority here. What surprises me about this is that I would guess from your writing that you've got enough experience under your belt to have realized that in every field, the average person is mediocre. Argument from authority is completely valid when the cited authority is authoritative on the subject under consideration. If someone justifies a statement about algorithms with "because Knuth said so" and can cite where he said it, that's a pretty solid basis to go on. The very nature of science is such that "widely held consensus of recognized experts" is the ultimate authority on current knowledge. This is not a guarantee of correctness, but it's a strong argument that it's the most likely, reliable answer we have and there's almost never a good reason for people outside the field to reject such consensus. The programming analogy falls down a bit in that the bar is somewhat lower for being considered "a programmer" than it is for being a reputable specialist in most scientific fields. If you narrow it enough to filter out the kind of "programmers" who fail FizzBuzz exercises, I expect you'd find that anything that 95% of them agree on is, in fact, far more correct than random chance. You and I have enough knowledge of programming to be able to evaluate good vs. bad arguments, and can probably identify lots of places where common wisdom is suboptimal. But what would you tell someone who knows nothing about programming but needs to know how to evaluate ideas about programming? Sure, we know that most programmers are stuck in a rut coding in Blub, but someone outside the field can't tell the difference between "overly structured programming is just obfuscation to create job security, simplify things and use gotos for flow control" and "use first-class functions to make code more expressive and eliminate redundancy". We'd all roll our eyes at the guy promoting goto statements as a route to more effective programming, right? Well, us dismissing "use more gotos" would look, to someone outside the field, exactly how doctors' reaction to the flu shot issue looks to you.