I laughed at this, and I agree that almost any sort of appeal to authority should be derided as the cheap trick it probably is. That said, Kent Beck says a lot of smart stuff in his books, and I don't think you should stop listening just because his name comes up.
Now somebody else is talking about "Kent Beck said something good about problem A" and there is the risk that "Kent Beck said so" outweighs the "something good about problem A".
Baudrillard writes about this phenomenon about the "precession of simulacra", which gets you roughly to the place Girard warns about -- Baudrillard reminds that there was something else in the past, Girard wouldn't care.
Steven Hawking said some absurd things about black holes in the 1970s that essentially postulated no quantum gravity (e.g. the propagator is not unitary and operators being unitary is almost the only thing you need to do quantum mechanics) I think the "cult of personality" held back work in QG for at least two decades, it wasn't until some brave people tried to calculate things with radically different methods and realized they were getting the same results and not by accident that the "information loss" concept is absurd, as is the classical picture of a black hole interior.
