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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Understanding how Facebook determines what goes in News Feeds

Facebook users often wonder why so much of the content they post never appears in the News Feed of their friends, and why they see only a small fraction of what their friends post.

The answer is simple: Facebook controls what appears in News Feeds using an algorithm called EdgeRank, which is so poorly conceived that it appears to have been designed by someone who is either bereft of common sense or a sadist who derives pleasure from giving Facebook users a needlessly hard time.

Facebook did not want its users to be inundated with information posted by friends, so they filter most of it out. That would be tolerable if they did a good job of separating the wheat from the chaff, but by hiring programmers who seemingly flunked Logic 101, logically filtering content is too much to ask from them.

The most obvious solution would be to have a “Subscribe” button so YOU could choose to receive all content from your most interesting and brilliant friends, or all of what they post on specific topics. However, Facebook doesn't have this basic feature. The closest they come to it isn't easy to find or use, but I'll make it as painless as possible. From your News Feed page, look at the top for Top News • Most Recent. If you aren't already on Most Recent, it will appear as a blue hyperlink, as shown below:

Click Most Recent and scroll to the bottom of the page. Click Edit Options near the bottom to open the News Feed Settings.

To see more of what a friend posts—Facebook won't let you see it all, type his or her name in the Show More box.

250 is currently the default maximum number of friends shown in Live Feed. I increased it by a factor of ten (to 2500) and didn't see much additional content in my feed although my thousands of friends posted content that could have been included. Thus, Facebook seems hell-bent on filtering content even when you tell it to back off.

Now do you see why Facebook programmers need more coffee?

Article continues below this image

Understanding EdgeRank

Considering how determined Facebook is to make life difficult for you, to maximize control of what appears in your News Feed and the feeds to your friends, you must understand the criteria EdgeRank uses to filter content. According to various experts, EdgeRank heightens the probability of including an item in a News Feed if the person posting it and the ones receiving it have had more Facebook interactions, such as:

However, Facebook refuses to disclose all criteria that influence whether an item appears in News Feeds. Their refusal to divulge their complete algorithm is not because it is so valuable (any competitor who copied EdgeRank would have rocks in his head!), but likely because they don't want their users to realize how pathetic their algorithm really is.

Might they be tight-lipped because they don't want users gaming the system? I don't think so. Facebook freely discloses some EdgeRank criteria that any semi-competent programmer could easily use to spike his ranking. Furthermore, even if you do everything possible to maximize your connection to a friend (or that friend to you), EdgeRank will still filter a substantial portion of News Feed content. I've written many private messages to some Facebook friends, clicked “like” and commented umpteen times on things they've written, repeatedly checked their profiles, and they've done the same for me, yet I still don't see most of what they post, nor do they see most of what I post.

Unless Facebook is vying to become a synonym for incompetent, or unless they are trying to replicate the success of MySpace in driving users away once something better comes along, Facebook should hire someone with a brain to overhaul EdgeRank.

Katie King was so exasperated by EdgeRank that she founded a group, FB: get rid of the news feed algorithm!

Tom Weber conducted a one-month experiment to discover the secrets of the Facebook algorithm and found that:

Considering how men are so enamored by beauty, this explains why hot young women are so popular on Facebook and why even trivial content from them is likely to appear in considerably more News Feeds than fascinating and insightful content from others. For example, some gorgeous women have posted two-word earth-shattering status updates such as “I'm tired” or “I'm bored” and received several dozen comments in less than 30 minutes. (Note: The adjacent model is not one of the boring beauties on Facebook.)

Some of my sheds:

See more >

Facebook thinks that most written content is automatically less valuable than photos or videos. Why should this be so? I posted pictures of some sheds I built and was surprised to see them receive more enduring attention than heavily researched articles I wrote that came to the attention of national figures who said my content was “great.” If a big shot media star says it is good and many Facebook friends “like” it and comment on it, even that isn't enough to keep it alive. Bottom line: In Facebook, words die quickly while videos and photos live on.

For something you post to appear in the News Feeds of some of your friends and stay there for a reasonable time, and for it to have any chance of appearing in even more News Feeds, your content must quickly generate interest as evidenced by people frequently clicking on it. No clicks, or just a few clicks, and it is history.

Even if you do everything possible, Facebook will still filter so much content that you will welcome the day when a better alternative comes along—and it will, leaving the Facebook brass scratching their empty heads in befuddlement as much as the MySpace leaders must wonder why their has-been site is no longer king of the social networking hill.

I've given you some secrets for understanding EdgeRank and circumventing some of its maddening limitations. If you can put 2 and 2 together, you will realize that I've also hinted at steps you could take to make EdgeRank think more of you and hence more likely to broadcast your content instead of suppressing it. I will implement one or more of these steps in my profile in the near future. If you can figure out what I'm doing, you're free to use my techniques to make Facebook think that you are wheat, not chaff.

Related topic: Tired of threatening messages from Facebook when sending friend requests?

Want to keep in touch?
(with me, not the model!)

If you want to be notified when I publish a new blog posting, you can use my free Track-this.info site. After you register, which takes just a few seconds, click the following link:
www.track-this.info/addtrack.php?topic=66

Incidentally, you can use my site to track any info you want to follow: your friends, a hobby or other interest, a product, a service, a high school class, your customers, your home, a book, an event—anything!

Track-this.info permits people to subscribe to any online or offline content, or to register topics for others to follow, so people can follow you.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what my site can do. It can also be used as a mailing list manager, social network to connect with your friends, fans, or customers (like Facebook), a blog, a personal website, and much more.

Please note that my site permits people to track (or follow) information; it doesn't track its users or what they do. Frankly, I don't care what you do—that is your business, not mine.

Related topics:

Tired of threatening messages from Facebook when sending friend requests?

Overcoming the 420-character limit for Facebook status updates

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