You are only thinking about a single belief on a single topic, but we are tasked with a near endless amount of potentially important things to form beliefs on a

You are only thinking about a single belief on a single topic, but we are tasked with a near endless amount of potentially important things to form beliefs on and an incredible sum of time and energy needed to actually do that yourself. Authorities would be open to judgement by communities. You can better leverage your trust in people to cut down on the amount of energy and time you need to spend to get to a reasonable opinion. There becomes less instances for common miscommunication to go unnoticed. Yes, this comes with a risk of being gamed, which is another interesting conversation, but that's more a human vs human topic than a humans vs reality topic. which is important (economic incentives destroying the world and all) but a bit off-topic from the more general point I am making basically, looking at all the details yourself is only good if you know what you are looking at and have the time to do so for everything you need beliefs on. The value that authorities provide is in consolidating multiple beliefs into a feed. Secondary to that is getting those beliefs to be high quality. Even if you go do the research yourself for a more quality belief to "fact-check" what you just heard - you have still accepted the value of the authority to tell you the TOPIC on which you should be forming a belief. All you did was locally iterate their work on a single topic to improve the deliverable. Context matters as well. I dont need to judge the facts myself to figure out how many people died in the california fires if that detail is included in the report from authority. I'm okay with an authority figure telling me that number. Maybe I could arrive at a more accurate number myself, sure - but to what extent does the accuracy matter? It certainly matters if I believe no one died, or if I believe the death toll was orders of magnitude higher than it was. The only real issue with trusting authority figures is the recursion. Authority figures using their own authority figures.. resulting in an appearance of multiple independent sources arriving at the same conclusion when in reality it is all signal boosting of a single source. To protect yourself, the simple thing to do is assume any people who say the same thing heard it from the same place until you're given reason to believe otherwise