If you are in the field, attempting to contribute, then I don't think authority is a good rubric. But for those of us who aren't, I think it's necessary. The world is too complex for all of us to make up our own minds on everything.
> But for those of us who aren't, I think it's necessary. The world is too complex for all of us to make up our own minds on everything.
More specifically, attempting to make up our minds on everything will inevitably lead us to accept the simplest superficially plausible explanations (that fit our existing biases), and the world is too complex for all those simple explanations to be correct, so we'll mainly find ourselves in the local maxima that have already been explored and properly abandoned by specialists.
