Unfortunately in my field (programming languages? I guess?) we just outright get ignored by the mainstream of our own field, even while they crow about how important we supposedly are.
Just last Thursday night I attended a talk in which an Esteemed Elderly Researcher complained, when asked for complaints, that computer scientists had not made enough progress in the verified construction of programs and in better programming languages since he was young, and remarked that everyone should have been listening to Alan Kay.
When I attempted to ask, "What about Simon Peyton Jones, Martin Odersky, and the formal PL community?", he basically acknowledged their existence, ignored our entire research field, and went back to saying not enough progress had been made in programming languages.
Still not sure if I asked wrong (raising one's hand and being called on is socially permissible, yes?), or if the mainstream CS research community (certainly including 100% of my own current department, much to my anguish and dismay on signing up as a grad-student under the naive impression we had a good three or so PL people here) is just davka bent on ignoring the formal study of programming languages and its massive advancements in recent years.
Expert consensus thus represents a concerted effort to ignore expert consensus.
In my article on trusting expert consensus, I talked about the value of having hard data on the opinions of experts in a given field. The unspoken subtext was that you should be careful of claims of expert consensus that don't have hard data to back them up. I've joked that when a philosopher says there's a philosophical consensus, what he really means is "I talked to a few of my friends about this and they agreed with me."
What's often really happening, though (at least in philosophy) is that the "consensus" really reflects the opinions of a particular academic clique. A sub-group of experts in the field spend a disproportionate amount of time talking to each other, and end up convincing themselves they represent the consensus of the entire profession. A rather conspicuous example of this is what I've called the Plantinga clique on my own blog—theistic philosophers who've convinced themselves that the opinions of Alvin Plantinga represent the consensus of philosophy.
But it isn't just theistic philosophers who do this. When I was in school, it was still possible to hear fans of Quine claim that everyone knew Quine had refuted the analytic synthetic distinction. Post PhilPapers survey, hopefully people have stopped claiming this. And one time, I heard a philosophy blogger berating scientists for being ignorant of the findings in philosophy that all philosophers agree on. I asked him for examples of claims that all philosophers agree on, I responded with examples of philosophers who rejected some of those claims, "Ah," he said, "but they don't count. Let me tell you who's opinions matter..." (I'm paraphrasing, but that was what it amounted to.)
I strongly suspect this happens in other disciplines: supposed "consensuses of experts" are really just the opinions of one clique within a discipline. Thus, I tend to approach claims of consensus in any discipline with skepticism when they're not backed up by hard data. But I don't actually know of verifiable examples of this problem outside of philosophy. Has other people with backgrounds in other disciplines noticed things like this?