Billionaire Venture Capitalist John Doerr is at it again, sinking his teeth into sustainability this time. He just put $1.1 billion into forming a new school at Stanford to study climate change and sustainability. A nice but misguided gesture.
No Thinker
That effort should start with the informed disclaimer (thanks to Richard Feynman) that sustainability, under the decline of available energy of Nature’s entropy, does not exist anywhere in the universe. Sustainability is incompatible with the evolutionary renewal dictated by Nature. Moreover, the principles of renewal rely on general relativity (thanks to Albert Einstein) rather than on the false absolutisms of truth. The pretense of sustainability promulgates the grave depravity of reason from the false inferences from consequence to cause (thanks to Friedrich Nietzsche).
The false promise of sustainability leads to regression. Only the ever-improving strength of renewal, deployed as better adaptability to entropy, can lead to progress. We must transition from manmade beliefs to Nature’s truth.
You would expect John Doerr, a renowned arbiter of Silicon Valley innovation, to understand the fundamental premise of innovation. The notion that innovation improves humanity is derived from a new and higher normalization of Nature’s truth. Quite a different proposition from John’s expertise of the mindless solipsism of promoting and monetizing the conversion of advertising clicks described as a groundbreaking innovation in Silicon Valley.
Money, specifically derived from strong winds that even made turkeys fly, does not equal merit. Especially not from people who do not know how the real world, in the words of comedian Ricky Gervais, let alone nature, works, in mine.
The problems facing humanity, in the words of Albert Einstein, cannot be solved with the same level of thinking and with the same people that got us there. John Doerr leans on and frequently references the best practices of people who depend on and permeate the undesirable consequential outcomes humanity faces. John lacks a comprehension of causation that can only be derived from a higher normalization of Nature’s truth.
No Doer
John also launched a plan through which he proclaimed to solve the climate challenge. A project he called “Speed & Scale.” Technology speak immediately, revealing John’s illiteracy of Nature, as it does not rely on speed nor scale to evolve.
Without reference to Nature’s first-principles, John’s plan lacks a humanitarian objective by which humanity must evolve. Spinning the wheels of society faster and doing more of the same, pointed in the wrong direction, will not get humanity off the wrong vector of expansion.
Let’s be clear; one cannot solve climate change. Humanity may only be able to slow down the acceleration of climate change and give us time to adapt to the many curveballs of entropy nature throws our way. Therefore, our efforts should focus not on climate but on the efficacy of humanity in dealing with change: requiring a fundamentally different plan and methodology.
John’s new focus comes after many earlier attempts to change the world we have created for ourselves. His ill-conceived efforts to suggest he knows best how to run the country, with USA Inc, during which our government found it necessary to do his job with Startup America, as he sank Kleiner Perkins to a new low.
With the same ignorance of causation by which he launched a plan to fix healthcare in 2018, he again taps into the thinking of those who benefitted most from our ballooning humanitarian dysfunction to come up with “groundbreaking” innovation to reinvent the dysfunction with more of the same. Nice try, John.
Inversion
The inconvenient truth of John’s actions, borrowed from John’s friend Al Gore, is that the false-positives of change, devouring precious time and opportunity cost, are worse than doing nothing. In the same way, cancer treatment should not only consist of covering up the wounds of cancer. We must address the cause of how humanity can improve life on earth.
The cause of climate change is entropy; the accelerant is human ignorance. The very ignorance to the cause by which John displays his misguided convictions.
The man is either not sincere or incredibly dumb. His so-called apology for underperforming venture performance was inaccurate and insincere, as I pointed out in an article picked up by Reuters. His stance on fixing healthcare has proven to be incorrect and inconsequential. And his view of what kind of innovation improves humanity is fundamentally flawed.
How can you trust a man who needs a book to tell him how to raise his children? How can you trust a man who, only after his adopted daughter alerted him, decided to spend his retirement on the greenwashing of climate change?
To improve human life on earth, we must learn how to play Nature’s game and not pretend we are here to serve or save Nature. It has done quite well without us for 4.5 billion years. Nature indulges us as long as we abide by its first-principles and toss our foregone, unfounded, and misplaced beliefs in the dustbin of history.
Sustainability should be at the bottom of that dustbin.
