Friends, let’s work on developing tricks.
Obviously, peer acceptance or, rather fear of peer rejection, seems to be the main hindrance preventing personal and intellectual independence; it is also the cause of many, many ills, where the collective can be vastly more wrong than individuals taken separately. What is not obvious is that using courage to stand up against peers is not a solution: most people are chicken, pusillanimous, spineless, and unwilling to go the next step.
Now are there obvious heuristics to counter this peer rejection, without going against human nature, a la Odysseus tied to the mast? If so, what are these?
[Note that, missing the role of peer acceptance as driver of intellectual pursuits, universities established tenure to help intellectual independence. Instead they got more comfortable –and more stupid — crowds. This gives us a hint for opposite tricks.]

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