Samo Burja
Sociologist and founder of Bismarck Analysis; writes on live players, institutional decay and why societies lose knowledge.
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It collects the places they publish and what they have said there, each linked to the source. They have no account here. Is this you? Claim it, correct it, or ask us to remove it from ppll.
Where they publish
Site samoburja.com His essays and talks. Has a feed.
Recent
- A New Way to Decipher the 2024 Race 9 Sept 2023
- On the State of the Art With Laibach 8 Dec 2022
- Science Needs Sovereigns 3 Oct 2022
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- How Ukraine Prepared Itself for Total War 11 May 2022
- The Great Eurasian Economic Realignment 17 Mar 2022
- Putin’s Bet 2 Mar 2022
- Why Civilization Is Older Than We Thought 18 May 2021
- The End of Industrial Society 24 Mar 2021 The Industrial Revolution stopped before it was ever completed. The aftermath is not a clean and developed world, but lost knowledge and civilizational decline.
- Knowledge Production and Intellectual Legitimacy 12 Jan 2021 New knowledge does not automatically become legitimate, authoritative, or even legible by virtue only of its truthfulness. Bringing the frontier of knowledge into the mainstream requires intentional effort.
- How Ideas Are Communicated 6 Jan 2021 A white paper is just a PDF is just a Microsoft Word document. Format and medium affect the legitimacy of the ideas expressed within them.
Link verified 20 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 12 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
Civilisational collapse can be fast: the Late Bronze Age shows a society coming apart over years rather than centuries.
Though we usually think of collapse as a slow process, it can in fact happen very quickly, as was the case with the Late Bronze Age collapse.
Why Civilizations Collapse Said 19 Aug 2020
Societies rarely recognise their own collapse while it is happening: Roman and Mayan thinkers left almost no reflection on theirs.
Despite being an excellent epistemic opportunity, civilizational collapse seldom inspires introspection among thinkers living through it. Mayan or Roman thinkers don’t seem to have reflected on their ongoing collapse.
Why Civilizations Collapse Said 19 Aug 2020
In a dysfunctional society the loss of working knowledge becomes routine, and attempts to reverse-engineer what was lost do not always succeed.
That knowledge never should have been lost in the first place, but in a dysfunctional society, such loss of knowledge becomes the rule.
Why Civilizations Collapse Said 19 Aug 2020
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We behave as though we already live in a scientifically planned society that cannot collapse on any timescale worth worrying about.
We act as if we are already living in a scientifically-planned society, immune to collapse on a time scale that any of us have to worry about.
Why Civilizations Collapse Said 19 Aug 2020
Institutions die at succession, and it is two problems rather than one: handing over power, and handing over the skill to steer.
The succession problem has two components: power succession (handing off the reins of the institution, keeping it piloted) and skill succession (transferring the skill needed to pilot the institution well, keeping it a live player).
The Succession Problem Said 3 Aug 2018
Silicon Valley celebrates disruption because it has given up on institutions ever solving their succession problem.
Silicon Valley enthuses over “disruption” because we have become so used to the succession problem remaining unsolved within discrete institutions such as companies.
The Succession Problem Said 3 Aug 2018
When a functioning organisation dies, capital that cannot be sold or transferred dies with it.
Functioning firms are repositories of many kinds of capital that cannot be liquidated, and when they die, it is destroyed.
The Succession Problem Said 3 Aug 2018
A functioning institution is a rare exception and never grows by itself: it was assembled by a founder with good judgement.
And just as a tornado cannot assemble a Boeing 747 by passing through a junkyard, functional institutions are not spontaneously generated. The machinery, if it functions, was assembled by someone with good judgment: the institution’s founder.
Functional Institutions are the Exception Said 9 Jul 2018
Repairing a dysfunctional institution is harder than building a functional one from scratch, because its internal forces resist change and the dysfunction is hard to diagnose in the first place.
It is much more difficult to make a dysfunctional institution functional than to create a functional institution from scratch; institutions will nearly always have internal forces that resist change, and diagnosing institutional dysfunction in the first place is challenging.
Functional Institutions are the Exception Said 9 Jul 2018
Institutional decay is the normal case: keeping an existing capability alive is difficult and growing a new one is rare.
Decay is in fact the rule: the maintenance of old institutional abilities is difficult, and the growth of new ones is rare.
Institutional Failure as Surprise Said 24 Apr 2018
You cannot tell a failing institution from a healthy one by looking: the parts visible from outside are the parts that least reflect its actual health.
Discerning whether an institution is near failure is a difficult epistemic problem. There are many outwardly visible pieces of institutions that do not reflect their actual health.
Institutional Failure as Surprise Said 24 Apr 2018
The easiest way for an institution to protect its reputation is to stop attempting anything that could visibly fail.
An easy way to avoid spoiling a reputation is by never failing, and an easy way to never visibly fail is to never undertake a task.
Institutional Failure as Surprise Said 24 Apr 2018
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said. The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter, especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked article and a belief on korrents.com are left in their original language.