These days here in the "reality-based community", we like the idea of following the consensus opinion of scientific experts; but it could be argued that this is a form of the classical logical fallacy of "argument from authority".
There's a common resolution out there to this apparent contradiction: "argument from authority" gets rephrased something like: argument from false or misleading authority. I'm not at all convinced that this is the right approach.
If you look around at the way we actually evaluate information, I think you can see that we use multiple stages; there are at least two levels of engagement with two different standards of evidence: the quick look and the close focus. A rule of thumb like "trust the experts" is excellent in the early stages, but the logical fallacies become important in the later stages.
We have two "gatekeepers", and both are very useful, but they work at two different phases in the intellectual process.
There are far too many voices in the world to treat all of them equally and thoroughly, instead we try to first filter out things that don't seem promising. And we often do it using rules-of-thumb that would seem very sloppy if invoked in the more rigorous later stages of evaluation.
That initial filter does not seem to be discussed very often-- in fact, I think we often pretend that it doesn't exist or shouldn't exist, though really something like it is an absolute necessity.
Once we recognize that that initial filter is needed, then we can think about how it works, and how we might improve it...
