Meaning: 67% of Americans have the Knowledge and Critical Thinking Skills of a medieval peasant.  

Therefore: whenever there is a choice between deciding an action was based on ignorant stupidity or a rational deeply laid plan .... go with ignorant stupidity.

She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre

We use the word "authority" to mean lots of things -- police and state actors are "the authorities", an expert may be "an authority on the matter, etc. But I want to suggest that it is very useful to think of authority as a characteristic of information in a social context. In particular, information is "authoritative" when some community of people to coordinate upon it and behave as if it were true, regardless of whether or not the information is in fact true, or even of whether the individuals doing the behaving personally believe it to be true. If information is authoritative, members of the community behave as if the information is true even despite strong, often opposing interests in the question. When we claim that someone "is an authority", we are claiming that the information they produce will (or should) alter behavior within some human community. Authority subsists in the relationship between information and behavior in a social context.
Let's take an example. A judge, in the context of a trial, is an authority. Suppose a judge pronounces a defendant guilty, despite her protestations of innocence. Both parties have produced information. But it is the information produced by the judge that guides the behavior of the vast preponderance of the community. Suppose the bailiff, who was present for the trial, privately came to a different conclusion than the judge, and believes that the defendant is in fact innocent. The bailiff will nevertheless behave as if she were guilty, taking her back into custody rather than setting her free.

More often than not, there is not so much cognitive dissonance. Most of us, most of the time, take a huge variety of conjectural "social facts" as given, condition our behavior as if they were true, and to the degree that we even give them a second thought, we believe them to be true. I log into my bank's website, and check the balance of my account. Most of the time, I take the number presented as an authoritative representation of how much money I have "there". I would prefer, quite strongly, that the number be millions larger, and my deposit balance at a bank is nothing more or less than what the bank acknowledges that it owes to me, so it is in a small way extraordinary that the bank and I are so willing to agree, despite diametrically opposed economic interests on the matter. But the miracle of authority is that it quells many disputes so thoroughly that parties don't even imagine that there is any ambiguity or question to argue about. Authoritative information presents itself as factual, even when it (like a bank balance) has no external, empirical referent and is purely a social construction.

Communism was such a colossal failure that the world's largest superpower had to ramp up spending to try (and fail) to beat it into space, and build military bases around the world to prevent purportedly communist governments from surfacing.

— Unlearning Economics (@UnlearningEcon) 27. Juli 2018

A Victorian cure for sea sickness  was an injection of laudanum and water into the rectum, which is then corked overnight, with a specially designed bum cork, to prevent any escaping.

-  @JoanPassey's paper at #AnxiousForms2018

Amazing. 😂🌊🤮

— Whores of Yore (@WhoresofYore) 27. Juli 2018

The way the world's safest people have these constant weird fantasies of persecution -- by The Left, or MS-13, or The Terrorists, or all of them working together -- makes more sense when you see them as ghost stories, ie, the chance to feel a pleasurable little frisson of fear pic.twitter.com/ot5Bfblbi8

— Jon Schwarz (@schwarz) 30. Juli 2018