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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Tired of threatening messages from Facebook when sending friend requests?

So am I. If you try to connect with more than a few people you don't personally know, you will soon see a warning message like one of the following:

If you click the Help Center link, you'll be told that “Facebook is a place for connecting with friends, family and other people you know personally.”

Ridiculous! I connect with people I know personally via e-mail, phone, and speaking with them in the same room. I don't need a quirky, bug-infested, exasperating site such as Facebook to connect with existing friends. Like almost everyone else who uses Facebook, I use it to connect with like-minded individuals for networking and to forge new friendships. If Facebook doesn't understand this, they're even more backwards than I imagine.

Now let's think about this logically for a second—something the Facebook brass apparently never has done. It is very easy to differentiate spammers from legitimate users. If someone used Facebook for hundreds to thousands of hours without triggering others to report spammer-like behavior, one can safely conclude that user is not a spammer, so threatening to brand him or her as one for sending a friend request is pointless—even idiotic. Connecting with people you don't know is the primary way that Facebook attracts new users and encourages existing users to spend more time on that site. Who would discourage behavior that is the cornerstone of their business growth? An imbecile.

In contrast, spammers waste no time in encouraging people to view their webcams. None of my thousands of Facebook friends ever used the word “webcam,” but virtually every bimbo who sends me a friend request has that word plastered all over her wall. Any computer programmer with a room-temperature IQ and a smidgen of common sense could easily distinguish Wendy Webcam from Tea Party Tim, so labeling friend requests as spam strongly suggests the minds of Facebook programmers are filled with cobwebs, not bright ideas.

Incontrovertible evidence of incipient dementia, or garden-variety stupidity?

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As a doctor, I am trained to quickly assess cognitive performance. Within seconds, I can tell if someone is bright with an abundant reservoir of brilliance or camouflaging their deficits with robotic dialogue that misleads most laymen into thinking that because the person in question can still concatenate words into sentences, he or she still possesses an intact intellect. People who are mentally slipping, or never had much brainpower in the first place, often employ logic that is anything but logical.

I've seen clear-cut evidence of third-rate minds at work when Facebook tempts me with a friend suggestion and I send a friend request to that person, only to be curtly told that my request cannot be sent because the user has too many friends.

Sheesh! If that person did indeed have too many friends (or friend requests—yet another Facebook flaw), the logical thing is obviously to not display that person to others as a friend suggestion. As a computer programmer, I know this is easy to implement, requiring only rudimentary programming and logical skills, yet Facebook can't do it. Go figure.

More Facebook follies

I went to accept a friend request, but was not permitted to do that because the person “already has too many friends.”

Logic? None.

I wanted to accept another friend request and was given the following advice from Facebook:

Oh my word! If I accepted only people I already know, my friend list would be so small that I wouldn't need Facebook to connect with them. Does anyone need such tutelage?

No. Facebook wastes its time—and our time—on such inane messages, but it fails to give users tools that could quickly help them assess whether they want to accept or deny a friend request.

The “We're #1, so we can slack off” recipe for failure

I know what Facebook is arrogantly thinking: “We're Facebook. We're #1 in social networking. We can be as exasperating as we want and our users will have to put up with our myriad bugs and bizarrely illogical ways of doing things.”

Since Facebook is so fond of warnings, I'll give one to the Facebook brass: Remember MySpace? It was once King of the Social Networking Hill, and now it's a pathetic has-been. Its users tired of its flaws and moved on. Users will migrate away from Facebook, too. The critical mass of discontentment already exists, but rather than trying to extinguish it, Facebook leaders are fueling the fire by insulting its users and subjecting them to a conceptually and technically flawed site. Brilliant!

Related topics:

Understanding how Facebook determines what goes in News Feeds

Overcoming the 420-character limit for Facebook status updates

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