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brazil84 comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 1: Mainstream Nutrition Science on Obesity - Less Wrong
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When you accuse Taubes of misrepresenting others' views, you touch on an important point. Before you can trust the expert consensus, you need to determine (1) what the proper class of experts is; (2) what exactly the issue in controversy is; and (3) how the experts actually stack up on that issue.
If it's a controversial issue, you can bet that the above 3 meta issues will also be controversial. If you have the intelligence and critical thinking skills necessary to resolve the 3 meta issues, then you can probably make a good assessment of the underlying controversy independently. On the other hand, if you are self-deceived or stupid about the underlying issue, then you will probably fool yourself on the meta issues too.
So "trust the expert consenses" doesn't seem all that helpful to me.
All this is true. However, these variables are not always perfectly correlated. It is important to recognize cases where some or all of (1), (2), or (3) are easier to answer than the object level question. That is when trusting the expert consensus is a good idea.
Well I think all 3 need to be satisfied. But that only happens when the issue is non-controversial. In which case you can just look up the answer on Wikipedia.
If an issue is controversial, it's a pretty safe bet that one or both sides will (1) distort the issue to make the other side seem less reasonable; (2) exaggerate the extent to which supposed authorities agree with them; and/or (3) attempt to choose a class of supposed experts which is most favorable to their position.