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

“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

NOTE: Several family members were brutally slaughtered recently, so I will take a break from writing. Their deaths erased my affinity for writing about politics or the economy, thus I'll later limit myself to health and brainpower in addition to completing my book on rapidly overcoming racism and bigotry. BTW, the two men who murdered my father are still on the lam; I am offering up to $100,000 for information leading to their arrest and conviction.

Proof that the rich often have a larger slice of the pie than they deserve

In the United States, the richest 1% account for 24% of the nation's income—but do they do a quarter of the work?

Far from it.

Do they generate a quarter of the great ideas?

The answer is a resounding no, as I discussed in an article on wealth inequality. Some rich folks deserve every penny of what they have, but most are the beneficiaries of luck or took a larger slice of the pie than they deserve by using crafty evasions of laws and ethics.

Luck is rarely the sole factor behind wealth, but it often plays a significant role in determining who is merely successful versus who is über-rich.

Want proof? Consider this simple thought experiment. Let's say that God is having second thoughts about how the economic pie is divided, so he levels the playing field, equally distributing the wealth. To compensate the ones he took money from, he doubles the earnings of the winners of this game if they were previously rich. Thus, when the dust settled years later, some people would be poor, and some would be rich, but the ones originally wealthy would be given a bonus by God for coming out ahead after he pressed an economic reset button designed to test whether wealth was equitably distributed.

I would jump at the chance to play this game, but how many rich people would? Not many, because—despite their often overblown egos—deep down, they know they have much more than they deserve. If Bill Gates were to participate in that economic reset game, what is the chance he would be the world's richest man?

Zero. Judging by his exasperating software replete with glaring errors evident to everyone with common sense and at least a room-temperature IQ, Gates isn't even smart enough to hire people who can point out the obvious flaws in his products. For Microsoft to prevail over other software companies is as logical as an ugly duckling winning a beauty contest.

Even Gates is incensed by the junk they sell that makes people want to scream (see Bill Gates On Microsoft: Damn, Our Usability Sucks based on his epic rant that was verified as authentic). One reason why even very smart people have so many problems using Microsoft's garbage is that smart people think logically, but logic and high IQs are no match for shoddy, scatterbrained products thrown together by people who either don't care what they are doing or are so bereft of common sense they can't see what they are doing wrong. A reporter who spoke to Gates about his rant said he “didn't seem to understand why the message would be news to people.”

Gates didn't understand that? What planet is he on? Like many rich people, Gates uses his money to insulate himself from people who live in the real world, including his customers, whose lives are often beset with the myriad goofy problems that Microsoft is adept at generating.

I've had patients in the ER upset and even depressed after dealing with Microsoft problems that would drive almost anyone bonkers. One man shot his computer. Microsoft's ineptitude provoked a computer magazine columnist to say that he'd like to lob some grenades toward Redmond, Washington (home of Microsoft).

In a Forbes article (Dim Vista), Stephen Manes wrote, “Vista is at best mildly annoying and at worst makes you want to rush to Redmond, Wash. and rip somebody's liver out.” He cut to the heart of the problem by saying, “If I can find plenty of problems in a matter of hours, why can't Microsoft? Most likely answer: It did—and it doesn't care.” Microsoft would rather torment its users than bother to fix them; Microsoft has better things to do. If it's half-assed, poorly conceived, and poorly implemented, Microsoft thinks it is good enough for its customers. Let 'em go pound sand or rip their hair out!

One of my brilliant customers has a father with a stratospheric IQ who was one of the pioneers of the computer industry, yet even he has been so frustrated by Microsoft products that he fantasized about visiting their campus and doing them bodily harm.

I lost a fiancée because of Microsoft. The plan was for me to complete a book I was writing in about two weeks, then join her in Maine so we could get married. Thanks to endless computer crashes, that two weeks stretched into six months—too long. It's too bad I wasn't still using my Atari 520 ST computer, which never crashed in all the years I used it. I heard of computer crashes at that time and wondered what they were; Microsoft gave me a good education in that. There's an obvious (to me) way to undo computer crashes so users don't lose data, need to reboot, or pull their hair out, but Microsoft evidently hasn't thought of that.

That's not surprising. Manes added:

After Microsoft bragged that using Vista may leave you speechless, searching for words, a writer said au contraire by writing:

Some people claim that Gates is always the smartest person in the room, but that is a reflection of the human tendency to flatter rich people by sycophantically magnifying their assets and minimizing their flaws. Gates wasn't even close to being the smartest or most creative person at Microsoft. Had it been led as an intellectual meritocracy, it could have produced much better software, and when my Mom purchased a computer to communicate with her grandchildren via e-mail, she could have spent more time doing that than trying to solve the endless stumbling blocks that Microsoft gives to its customers.

Microsoft Word's spell-checker is so pathetic it often flags even common words as being misspelled when they are not. The following screenshot shows it flagging percent:

Gates deserves his billions as much as President Obama deserves his Peace Prize (Obama's lack of dovishness prompted many of his former supporters to brand him as Bush III), or as much as Teresa Heinz deserves her fortune. What did she do to deserve it? Be lucky enough to be attractive enough to marry Henry John Heinz III, an heir to the Heinz family fortune.

If so, please tell me about it.

Teresa's husband “earned” his fortune by sliding down the right birth canal, but despite his privileged Ivy League education, he didn't have enough common sense or concern for others to keep his Piper Aerostar from colliding with a helicopter over an elementary school, killing two first-grade girls, critically burning a boy, injuring “the school custodian and an unknown number of other bystanders.” Heinz was a licensed pilot in a small twin-engine plane, so he should have insisted that the pilot follow standard protocol. As The New York Times noted, when planes report problems with their landing gear, “a more common procedure [. . . is] to fly low over the airport so that observers on the ground can look at its undercarriage.” They added that “even with the landing gear up, it is possible to land a small plane on its belly without severe risk to occupants.” Of course, when you're rich and famous, you can bend the rules, but not the laws of physics.

I've seen rich people in the hospital acting as if their wealth gave them the right to special treatment. In their minds, it was perfectly acceptable to insist that others who weren't rich and well-connected should wait so they could be treated like royalty. Believe it or not, but the hospital brass actively participated in the care of VIPs. Even in the frigging middle of the night on a weekend, if a VIP was coming in by car or ambulance, a big shot hospital administrator would call me and usually show up before the VIP hit the ER door. The message was clear: This person deserves special treatment. The crying kids? The people with kidney stones? The patients with heart attacks, strokes, seizures, and diabetic coma? They can wait.

I could fill a series of thick books describing people like Teresa Heinz and her husband who have far more than they deserve. Would they voluntarily participate in God's economic reset game? Never in a million years.

Is all of this a moot point? Not really. Understanding it is key to understanding why the world has so many problems that persist indefinitely. Most of the wealth and power is disproportionately held by those who aren't the smartest, most creative, hardest working, or most caring. Instead, money and power are concentrated in people who are often the beneficiaries of luck. They know it, and they'll be damned if they will permit changes that make the world more of a meritocracy and less of a lottery of luck.

I did something that Bill Gates, Teresa Heinz, or Henry John Heinz III did not do: earn a doctorate degree, which only 1% of U.S. adults possess. I graduated in the top 1% of my class in medical school, which had nothing to do with luck. Give me an exam (some 1000 questions long) filled with questions that would make an average person's head spin, or give me a patient screaming in pain or gasping for breath, or give me an x-ray or EKG to read, and I can consistently perform two standard deviations above the level of average doctors.

However, I wasn't born smart. My sixth-grade teacher was so exasperated by my stupidity that he called me “slow” in front of the class. I had to work hard for many years to ascend the bell curve of intelligence. By the time I completed my training, but before I earned a single dollar as an attending physician, I'd already worked more hours than most people do in their entire lives.

Few people realize how many hours it takes to go from being a high school graduate to a licensed physician, and how many more it took me to go from a dunce to being elected to membership in Alpha Omega Alpha (AΩA). AΩA “is to medicine what Phi Beta Kappa is to letters and the humanities and Sigma Xi is to science.” AΩA members include dozens of Nobel Prize winners in Physiology or Medicine and almost 75% of U.S. medical school deans.

The fact that I went from dunce to doctor (after serendipitously discovering how to augment IQ and creativity) made me a fan of meritocracies. Call me biased if you will, but I think people who work as hard as I did (and do) should be rewarded and have more, which incentivizes others to work hard and make sacrifices. In retrospect, some of the things I gave up, such as time with family and friends, and even special occasions with them (weddings, Thanksgiving, Christmas, family reunions, etc.), were priceless. However, my medical career and the sacrifices I made for it are just a fraction of the overall ones I've made in pursuit of success and my dream of helping others. What did I do my last Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day? I worked all of them, about 16 hours per day, getting paid for generating ideas. Like most dream jobs, it's not as easy as it seems.

Many people are smarter than I am and work just as hard, but they couldn't begin to do what I do because they let themselves be molded by a world that champions inside-the-box thinking as the perfect way to keep sheeple from daring to suggest changes designed to address pressing problems. In my opinion, most of the über-rich care less about solving those problems than staying on top of the pile, even if those at the bottom are crushed by them.

Nathan Myhrvold, one of the true geniuses at Microsoft, remarked that a friend of his said that “you can’t do anything new in the world without being misunderstood.” True. History abounds with examples of how brilliant innovators were scorned and ridiculed. For all the lip service we give to valuing new ideas and those who generate them, we're often allergic to the former and eager to lambaste the latter, preferring to reserve our adulation for cute dysfunctional celebrities and professional athletes skilled at playing children's games.

Now you know why the world is less successful and less peaceful than it could be: what should have been a meritocracy became a luckocracy: a system in which advancement is based not on individual achievement, but too often on luck. By itself, luck has a tenuous ability to ensure continued success, which is why the beneficiaries of luck dare not risk significant change.

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Bloody hands and wealth inequality

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