I don't consider those as "our" memes, except if you meant Western culture in general. Those seem like bad ideas, smart or not smart. I would prefer something like "Distinguish intellectual authorities that have reasons to be correlated with truth (because of the incentive structures) from authorities who derive their status from other things (success in unrelated fields, good communication skills, saying what people want to hear), and take the first kind seriously."

"Trying to figure everything out yourself" is something I associate with smart-but-not-rational people who are likely to waste a lot of time or even get things completely wrong because they noticed they were smarter than their primary school teacher, and extrapolated to deduce they were smarter than established experts, which is certainly pleasant to think!

In a social species, believing authority is probably quite adaptive to the less intelligent just for getting things right. And then there is the adaptive value of going with the herd, because the herd likes that.

Epistemic rationality is really only valued by mutants with a fetish for it, and the capability to be relatively good at it. And while they get some benefits from their fetish, they pay a social cost for it too.