There's a stigma against simply taking the word of an authority, and rightly so; on the net, the world would be better if more people stopped to think for themselves (does anyone disagree?).

Yes, I disagree. Remember that if people "stop and think for themselves," they have to stop what they were doing otherwise. If their comparative advantage is doing, rather than thinking, this may well be a poor choice.

It seems to me that there are good reasons to think for yourself:

• The agency problems of trusting an expert
• How can you choose the right expert to trust if you don't understand the subject itself?

Versus equally good reasons to delegate thinking:

• Division of labour
• Error-checking
• If your understanding is so poor that you can't choose the right expert, how will you understand the subject?

Therefore, most people will do a mixture of thinking for themselves and trusting experts. In particular, people should most think for themselves when agency problems are most severe, when good experts are hard to identify, and where their own thinking will get rapid and plentiful feedback (classic example - household finances). People should defer to experts most readily when agency problems are small, when good experts are easy to identify, and where there own thinking will get very little feedback (classic example - history).

Unfortunately, claiming to think for yourself is also a brag - it is a way of signalling that you are an expert, or nearly an expert, or that you are capable of understanding a domain. So for these signalling reasons, people think for themselves more than is genuinely wise, and as a result we see many autodidacts with obviously wrong beliefs. Even more widespread, we see people who think that they have "thought for themselves" about a subject, but in fact have just read a small selection of popular books on the subject - in reality, this is just deference to an expert, but because they do not consider it as such, they have wasted their time by this study; even worse, because they believe they are thinking for themselves, they do not consider the degree to which they are trusting an expert, and so frequently choose their sources unwisely, based on e.g. literary qualities rather than accuracy.

I have heard plenty of claims that people defer to authority too much, but never one that had any weight behind it. Mostly, they are mere assertion/mood affiliation.