everyone to some extent uses 'authority' as a proxy for truth, it is impossible for an individual to know everything before making a determination as to it's truthfulness (Even the notion of an absolute truth is in the domain of philosophy). Even SV is full of smart people who get sucked into group think because they desperatly want to believe something and seek out authoritarian sources that confirm their beliefs. "Oh Karpathy said something about LLM's replacing all software engineers? Must be true even though i have no idea how an LLM works"