Worth separating two things that share the word. Epistemic authority is a track record you can check: this person has been right about bridges, so I weight their opinion on bridges. Positional authority is a claim on obedience that arrives with a title, and refusing that is reasonable rather than illogical. Where the refusal gets expensive is coordination. In an operating theatre nobody re-derives the anaesthetist judgement, and a team that audits every instruction in real time never finishes. The useful question is whether being wrong about someone is cheap to discover. Titles fail that test quietly; track records fail it loudly.