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Samo Burja Profile picture
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5 Mar, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Great reading list! Some of the more eclectic tastes on Twitter. Highly recommend following @miltonwrites for his threads if you yourself don’t read as many books as you should!

Few would know to dive into material like Project Cybersyn. Truly fascinating history.

It’s also always worth reading old books, not just for the information within them, but to absorb something of the mindset and worldview of people long gone. It is its own kind of information.

I would also be remiss not to mention my own Recommended Reading List in this thread:

samoburja.com/eight-books-to…

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More from @SamoBurja

Samo Burja Profile picture
7 Mar
geriwalton.com/voltaires-coff…

Worth reading this post on Voltaire and Coffee. One of my pet theories is that societies tend to morph when exposed to new drugs.

1/n
After a period of adaptation a culture becomes resistant to the social effects of a drug. All remaining organizations and ideologies become resistant to whatever noise that drug introduced into their system.

2/n
An analogy can be made to antibiotic resistant bacteria. Chinese and Mediterranean society grew wine-proof by the Iron Age. Coffee had a rampage in the 18th century. Hard liquor was still giving the Russians and Irish severe social problems in the 19th century.

3/n
Read 5 tweets
Samo Burja Profile picture
6 Mar
Western society has nearly completely lost the infrastructure that could support complex thinking.
To dig into the relevant infrastructure:

1. A culture open to voicing accurate observations about itself. Every capable thinker voices these early in life before they learn better, if this disqualifies them, the culture cannot support original thinkers.
2. Viable economic niches. Academia is much too contested. Silicon Valley allows for some original thinking, but the thinking isn't what provides returns.
Read 7 tweets
Samo Burja Profile picture
22 Feb
Intellectual history is rewritten every time there is a significant shift in political and economic power.

1/n
Voltaire and other 18th century writers took it upon themselves to rewrite recent scientific history. They elevated Galileo and Newton while downplaying the credit both of these thinkers gave to Hellenistic predecessors.

2/n
Rather than triumphant adherents of a revived tradition of knowledge, Galileo and Newton's breakthroughs were recast as triumphs of pure individual reason.

They of course are also such triumphs, but Newton had good reason to insist he stood on the shoulders of giants.

3/n
Read 9 tweets
Samo Burja Profile picture
5 Feb
Ancient Rome is correctly noted for its production of highly skilled individuals. But despite no shortage of talent, they often struggled with transferring power to these leaders.

Their surprising solution was the practice of adult adoption

samoburja.com/how-roman-empe…

1/n
I have noted before the paramount importance of the succession problem when it comes to institutional functionality.

Great founders build great institutions, but when founders die or retire, they need to find and install a worthy successor:

samoburja.com/the-succession…

2/n
The succession problem has two components: skill succession and power succession.

A successor must be sufficiently skilled to pilot the institution they will lead. They must also have enough power to actually lead it.

Succession can fail on either or even both.

3/n
Read 10 tweets
Samo Burja Profile picture
17 Jan
When an institution fails, nobody seems to have seen it coming. The collapse of the Soviet Union came as a shock even to the Soviet dissidents.

Why exactly are we always caught off guard? Because we have a poor understanding of institutions:

samoburja.com/institutional-…

1/n
Institutions are full of automated systems—bureaucratic procedures—which dominate outward institutional appearance. More often than not, these systems persist far longer than their designers do. Focusing on them obscures the true, underlying sources of institutional health.

2/n
Moreover, institutions often lean on outside institutions. That a bank branch is able to pay a utility to keep its lights on tells us nothing about the bank’s own functionality; we should generalize this observation to a broad range of core features that may be outsourced.

3/n
Read 8 tweets
Samo Burja Profile picture
14 Jan
Competition for power unfolds over a strategic landscape.

As I explained in Empire Theory Part I, we can split this landscape into three power classes: high, mid, and low. In Part II, I illustrate how these classes vie for power:

samoburja.com/empire-theory-…

1/n
Even those aligned on overall ends may choose to compete over power.

But with competition comes coordination; the dance between the two defines the landscape. Even unaligned actors may be induced to coordinate against others.

2/n
I go into detail about each interaction in the piece, but the tense interaction between mid and high is the most important part of the analysis.

The main variable is resources. High must incentivize mid not to raid the resources concentrated at the top.

3/n
Read 6 tweets

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