The problem is that the very fact that experts are listened to and respected creates incentives to become certified as an expert or to claim to be an expert, and that these incentives are non-truth-tracking. If you lust for fame and glory, or you want to seem original, or if you have a political agenda, or if you're worried about what your publisher thinks will sell---all these sorts of things might help your bid to be certified as an expert or hinder it, but they're not directly about the map that reflects the territory, and everything that's not directly about the map that reflects the territory just adds noise to the process.
In a physical science with conclusions nailed down for decades, sure, don't even think about questioning the consensus. But on an issue people actually care about (sorry, physics nerds, but you know what I mean), if you have a concept of epistemic rationality, and you know about Aumann agreement and updating your beliefs on other people's beliefs as a special case of updating your beliefs on any data you get from your environment and you take all of this dead seriously, and you've read the existing literature, and you've spent many, many hours thinking about it, and you still find yourself disagreeing with the consensus---I'm not going to say you should forfeit your vision. You can't trust the mainstream, because the mainstream is insane. The fact that you're insane too doesn't mean you can just trust the authorities; it means you have to lower your confidence in everything.
But please---don't take my word for it!
We use heuristics when we don't have the time to think more, which is almost all the time. So why don't we compile a big list of good quality heuristics that we can trust? (Insert eloquent analogy with mathematical theorems and proofs.) Here are some heuristics to kick things off:
Make important decisions in a quiet, featureless room. [1]
Apply deodorant before going to bed rather than any other time. [1]
Avoid counterfactuals and thought experiments in when talking to other people. [Because they don't happen in real life. Not in mine at least (anecdotal evidence). For example with the trolley, I would not push the fat man because I'd be frozen in horror. But what if you wouldn't be? But I would! And all too often the teller of a counterfactual abuses it by crafting it so that the other person has to give either an inconsistent or unsavory answer. (This proof is a stub. You can improve it by commenting.)]
If presented with a Monty Hall problem, switch. [1]
Sign up for cryonics. [There are so many. Which ones to link? Wait, didn't Eliezer promise us some cryonics articles here in LW?]
In chit-chat, ask questions and avoid assertions. [How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie]
When in doubt, think what your past and future selves would say. [1, also there was an LW article with the prince with multiple personality disorder chaining himself to his throne that I can't find. Also, I'm not sure if I should include this because it's almost Think More.]
I urge you to comment my heuristics and add your own. One heuristic per comment. Hopefully this takes off and turns into a series if wiki pages. Edit: We should concentrate on heuristics that save time, effort, and thought.