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DanArmak comments on Why do you really believe what you believe regarding controversial subjects? - Less Wrong
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I don't have answers, but here are a few notes.
That's almost a tautology; if all experts were on one side, it wouldn't be controversial.
That said, many controversial subjects either don't have experts, or some sides of the controversy deny the expertise of the other sides. For instance, I don't need to refer to an expert theologist (and they are deep domain experts) to refute a particular religious belief.
There are lots of uncontroversial things I'm unsure about, because I don't trust the consensus-making process in the field. To be unsure of something because it is controversial, the experts and the consensus process has to be explicitly rational and truth-seeking; otherwise what I believe and how sure I am is only weakly correlated with what most 'experts' think on the subject. This rules out religion, politics, philosophy and most policy proposals as interesting controversies, leaving scientific and epistemological questions.
Slightly problematic unless you don't admit epistemology being part of philosophy. And it seems like almost as big a swamp as the rest of philosophy, though the problems seem much more worth resolving than in most of philosophy.
There is a paper "Experts: Which ones should you trust" addressing this issue by Alvin Goldman (http://philpapers.org/rec/GOLEWO -- you need JSTOR or something to actually get the article), one of the biggest names in epistemology and specifically social epistemology. Actually I don't think the article does very much to resolve the issue unfortunately. By the way, there are two schools of thought self-described as social epistemology which don't acknowledge each other except mostly to trade deprecations. Actually I don't think the article does very much to resolve the issue unfortunately.
google scholar is better than jstor. in fact, philpapers links to the same place, but drowning in worthless links.
Yes, I missed that. I meant most but not all philosophy.
And yet there are clearly some rational, truth-seeking experts on each side of many or most of these controversies.
If you can identify people who are rational, domain experts, honest, and incentivized to seek the truth, then I think you should trust them over the broader 'expert' community.
If such people don't agree with one another, then they should make clear why they disagree. If they fail to do this, then either they are not very good at practical rationality, or they aren't trying to make themselves clear to external observers.
If they've made it clear why they disagree, and it's a matter of domain expertise you're not qualified to judge yourself, then you're back to the outside view and head-counting. But I think this is a rare case.