Feynman wrote about this in The Meaning of it All - he thought one of the major problems with American society today (1960s) was that people could no longer distinguish confidence and expertise. The media has to have an answer for everything, even if that answer was a total guess. He thought that people ought to look much more favorably upon someone who says "I don't know, but I know how to find out" over someone who says "This is the answer, but I can't tell you how I got it."
Much of the Enlightenment was centered around that ideal - that authority figures do not have all the answers, but reason provides us with a means to figure them out. And it turned out to be quite successful - it brought us modern science, and evidence-based medicine, and the industrial revolution, and most of the progress of the last four centuries.
