Kevin Pezzi, MD

Disagree with something I wrote? So do I! Read more

“To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.”

— Elbert Hubbard, American editor, publisher, and writer (1856–1915)

Trivia: He and his wife, Alice Moore Hubbard, the noted feminist and writer, died aboard the RMS Lusitania, which was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on May 7, 1915, when they were heading to Europe to cover the war and interview Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

If you disagree with something I wrote, feel free to challenge it. Some of my viewpoints are the antithesis (exact opposite) of what they once were. That isn't flip-flopping; that is changing opinions with scant evidence to support them into convictions with a firmer foundation of facts.

My political philosophy is an amalgamation of libertarian, conservative, and liberal principles. My opinions have changed so significantly that my conservative friends might be horrified by how I strongly believe that liberals are correct on certain issues. I've previously written about some of them, but to make this more fun, I will present others as challenges in which I offer $100,000 to the first person who can refute the logic I used in forming that opinion. Please note that due to my limited time and difficulty using my hands after I broke my neck, I cannot quickly update my previously published opinions. However, now that I am balancing the promptings of head and heart, I strongly disagree with many opinions I expressed in my writings.

I like finding people who make me think, not necessarily those who agree with me. Genius Robert Heinlein said, “I never learned from a man who agreed with me.” If you can educate me, I'm all ears.

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”
— Albert Einstein

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
— Albert Einstein

“What I would like to see more often in this nation is an open and intelligent conversation, not people just casting aspersions at each other … it's unbelievable to me the way people act like third graders. And if somebody doesn't agree with them, they're this and they're that … it comes from both sides. And it's just so infantile.”
— Dr. Ben Carson, neurosurgeon

“The ultimate ignorance is the rejection of something you know nothing about and refuse to investigate.”
— Dr. Wayne Dyer

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking.”
— General George Patton

“Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

“A lot of people risk their lives in a brief act of heroism, which is kind of cool, but Jill has what I call slow heroism. She is risking her professional life on something that her own calculations show may not work for a thousand years—may not ever. So I like to support people that are risking their lives.”
— ex-Microsoft billionaire brainiac Nathan Myhrvold speaking about Jill Tarter, who inspired the character played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact. It takes a brilliant person to see that others who go against the grain of conventional wisdom may be sages although lesser minds often ridicule their ideas.

“I am not young enough to know everything.”
— Oscar Wilde

“You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
— Winston Churchill

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.”
— Euripides, Greek tragic dramatist (484 BC - 406 BC)

“It is socially unacceptable to be right too early.”
— Robert Heinlein

“I'd rather stand alone on the truth than with millions on a lie.”

“The most distinctive mark of a cultured mind is the ability to take another's point of view; to put one's self in another's place, and see life and its problems from a point of view different from one's own. To be willing to test a new idea; to be able to live on the edge of difference in all matters intellectually; to examine without heat the burning question of the day; to have imaginative sympathy, openness and flexibility of mind, steadiness and poise of feeling, cool calmness of judgment, is to have culture.”
— Arthur H. R. Fairchild

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
— Theodore Roosevelt

“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
— Abraham Lincoln

This reminds me of something stressed by one of my psychology professors, who said that society imposes rigid boundaries for what behavior is acceptable, and applies tremendous pressure trying to force people to conform to the behavioral expectations. Some of the most brilliant and productive outside-the-box thinkers led unconventional lives. One of the side effects of forcing people to think inside the box is that by lopping off outside-the-box behavior, potentially great outside-the-box ideas are lost, too.

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.”
— Edward R. Murrow, American journalist (1908-1965)

“You will not do incredible things without an incredible dream.”
— John Eliot

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A shocking example of how USA efficiency has plummeted

Commenting on the proposed plan for the Erie Canal, then-President Thomas Jefferson opined it was “little short of madness.”

Wrong. The Erie Canal was an engineering marvel: a 363-mile-long canal linking the Atlantic Seaboard and Great Lakes, with 18 aqueducts to cross rivers and 83 locks to raise and lower boats over the 682-foot vertical drop from one end to the other. Built between 1817 and 1825 without experienced surveyors, civil engineers, or skilled laborers, it slashed statewide shipping costs by 94% and created so much wealth that the term “millionaire” was coined shortly thereafter.

Cost? A mere $7 million—about $100 million in today's dollars. Now for something shocking: the canal was built primarily by hand supplemented with animal power. That is, no modern tractors, bulldozers, or other heavy equipment that can do more work in a day than a man—or even a man with a horse—can do in a year.

Since modern earthmoving equipment makes workers hundreds of times more productive and enormously more valuable even after factoring in equipment cost, why couldn't we replicate the Erie Canal for much less than the inflation-adjusted $100 million figure? Such a mammoth project would likely now cost over $100 billion and perhaps even more, thanks to predictable cost overruns and delays imposed by court orders halting construction so scientists could bemoan the project's impact on local mosquito populations and whatnot.

No one involved in building the Erie Canal system was an expert; instead, they improvised and learned as they went along. Even with almost 200 years of experience and heavy equipment that literally moves mountains, we can't begin to match the productivity per inflation-adjusted dollar of the original canal workers. Such a project would now cost 1000 times more—but why?

For as long as I can remember, economists have said that the productivity of American workers is steadily increasing. If we've really made such amazing leaps in output per worker, why are today's workers left in the dust by their early-19^th century counterparts with shovels and pickaxes but no chainsaws or Caterpillars?

The Flynn effect (“the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores”) should mean that people are now significantly smarter than they were when the Erie Canal was made, yet its builders using primitive technology did things today's best engineers couldn't do with advanced equipment unless they spent vastly more money. So are we truly more intelligent, or do we just perform better on IQ tests? The true test of intelligence is performance in the real world.

Neanderthals have been disparaged so much the name itself is a synonym for primitive and stupid, yet they developed a “technique of pitch extraction through a complex process known as dry distillation” and complex, multi-step methods of making stone tools that likely could not be replicated by Ivy League engineering students. They also manufactured synthetic material with underground distillation.

So as we're busy patting ourselves on the back for amazing progress, and oohing and aahing the latest trivial innovation from Silicon Valley that does remarkably little for the real world, the thinkers among us cannot help but wonder how supposedly primitive people and technology can leave us in the dust. And we wonder why we cannot outcompete China?

UPDATE 4-17-2019: After fire ravaged the Notre-Dame de Paris, I heard various people on TV and radio say it could never be rebuilt, or rebuilt as beautiful as it was. That's odd. It took a century to build most of the structure, which was largely finished by 1260. Did they have power saws, computerized milling machines, and other tools we don't?

Given that we have them, and they didn't, it seems a stretch to asseverate that we cannot build what they did. If cost were the primary impediment, material cost could be reduced to zero by architects specifying each of the many pieces required to build it, posting that on the Internet, with people signing up to make that piece and donate it. For example, I could turn one of my trees into a massive timber, cut precisely with whatever holes it needed—or mortise and tenon joints, etc. All very doable, so I don't understand the “can't do” attitude that is increasingly prevalent, making people shy away from big jobs.

Or does Silicon Valley have a better idea? Or is it too busy hyperfocusing on the next messaging app?

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