About

I created Ignorance of the Experts on the DigitalPress blogging platform to serve as an antidote to the “expert-worshipping” of the mainstream news media. I know you have all been exposed to it because it is pretty much all they do. Two good contemporary examples of “expert-worshipping” are the narrative around global warming or “climate change,” and the narrative around the COVID-19 pandemic. This “expert-worshipping” is often presented to the public using catchy phrases such as: “the science is settled,” or “listen to the experts” or “follow the science” and so on. They clearly are meant to stifle debate. Any “heretic” with the temerity to question these ex cathedra pronouncements is quickly dismissed by using another collection of preprogrammed responses such as “climate-change denier” or “anti-vaxxer” and so on.

In terms of content, my blog is much broader than the contemporary events of COVID-19 and “climate change.” I plan to look at all sorts of examples throughout history that illustrate the overall thesis of this blog, namely, experts are not infallible and they are not omniscient. In other words, they make mistakes, and their knowledge is limited. Experts also often disagree, and resolving their disagreements is sometimes impossible (or at least seems to be impossible to resolve). For example, in economics, the subject of “capital theory” is still unresolved, and the disagreements and debates have been ongoing for over a hundred years now.

Nothing is out of bounds to me. Nothing is sacred to me. In other words, I will write about any topic that illustrates and supports my overall thesis including controversial topics that often get dismissed as “conspiracy theories.” But the truth is that “conspiracy theory” research often proceeds in the manner that I consider to be correct, namely, an authoritative source says “this is the way it is,” and then the doubters come along and say “I think you are wrong, and here are the reasons why I think you are wrong.” A classic example of this happened after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The authoritative source in this case was the Journal of the American Medical Association that published its own version of what today we would call “the science is settled.” The “settled science” became the “official version” of the Kennedy assassination that I am sure you have all heard of. Of course, all of the “conspiracy theorists” reject the “settled science” and propose alternative explanations of what happened in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.

Pricing and Free Subscriptions

I plan to make this really simple. I plan to keep about 75% of my articles free for everyone to read, and I will make the remaining 25% of my articles accessible only to my paid subscribers. Payment processing is done by another company called Stripe. Stripe provides payment processing services for most blogging platforms including WordPress, Substack, Paragraph/Papyrus, Revue by Twitter, and of course Ghost (since Ignorance of the Experts is run on Ghost).

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DigitalPress will be posting advertisements on Ignorance of the Experts. They do this in order to help pay for the costs of running their servers and their other business expenses. I have absolutely NO control over what advertisements they will post. I guess you could say that even I am “ignorant” when it comes to the question of advertisements. When Ignorance of the Experts grows to include multiple paid subscribers, I will then be able to pay for the upgraded package on DigitalPress. The upgraded package allows me to remove all the advertisements. I plan to do so, but only when I know I have a large and reliable readership base.