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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Open Thread, January 1-15, 2013 - Less Wrong
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A relevant distinction that you are not making is between the questions that are well-understood in the expert's area and the questions that are merely associated with the expert's area (or are expert's own inventions), where we have no particular reason to expect that the expert's position on the topic is determined by its truth and not by some accident of epistemic misfortune. The expert will probably know the content of their position very well, but won't necessarily correctly understand the motivation for that position. (On the other hand, someone sufficiently unfamiliar with the area might be unable to say anything meaningful about the question.)
Good point. Also, even when questions are well-understood by domain experts it still can be very effective to argue about them, since this usually leads to the clearest arguments and explanations. This is especially true since the social norms on this site highly value truth-seeking, epistemic hygiene (including basic intellectual honesty) and scholarship: in many other venues (including some blogs), anti-expertise attitudes do lead to bad outcomes, but this does not seem to apply much on LW.