[00:00:06] Samo Burja Create clip welcome everyone. Today's talk is a mouthful. It's titled Civilization, Institutions, Knowledge and the Future. Basically, we find ourselves in a world that is radically out of our depth. We have not made most of the material or social artefacts that are so very vital to our continued existence. We've inherited them, or sometimes they have emerged seemingly almost un designed. But the fact is, someone in the world has to know how various things work simply because you don't doesn't mean that someone isn't keep keeping the lights on. And it is very interesting how it is possible for an entire society to have a view that this is someone else's problem. One of the reasons I appreciate a more positive outlook on the world is because I think it's the people that believe they can build things that end up learning things and are the people that end up maintaining the systems that the more cynical rely on. I feel that when it comes to human bias is cynicism can be realism. But cynicism can impede action, and optimism can be blindness. But you know you'll learn through work through building through. Creating propaganda has been with us for a good century.
[00:01:39] Samo Burja Create clip But what happens when we believe our own propaganda? What happens when one generation's cynical ploy for power becomes the cherished ideals of the next generation, or even its intellectual inheritance? That's when you have a severance of institutional memory, and that is when you have a severance off traditions of knowledge. But before I go too deeply into that, I am going to talk about what is a civilization and what civilizations are. I'm very unusual. I'm still something of a humanist. I sort of feel that human desires and goals matter for the shape of the future. I have not given up on the human race and I've not given up on our current civilization. So I tend to think that civilization is the harnessing of both social and material forces for human ends. Human ends are ultimately quite lofty, quite heavy. We are aiming for things that are much beyond a single lifetime, and that's why it's quite important that we build things that actually that actually hand off to the next generation what we have built. So here we have no disguise, quite famous. Arguably, he wrote a book or two and There's a very good quote by him. The quote is we are by nature, social animals.
[00:03:09] Samo Burja Create clip Anyone that can live alone is either a beast or a God. I haven't met many gods. Fortunately, I haven't met many beasts. But because of this we always rely on other people for the knowledge that we have in institutional contexts, we tend to trust the institutions we find ourselves in. We find ourselves in things like prisons or hospitals or schools or cities or states or cos we also find ourselves in the company of our friends. So the first thing hospitals, prisons, states is their institutions. The second thing our friends, our family, this is our social layer, these air, other people, we might trust institutions we might trust our friends. But we are in fact deferring to them. We're not thinking through everything from first principle. We're taking in assumptions all the time, both through our actions and through our beliefs and through where and who we choose to trust in Eastern Europe. You know, I'm originally from Slovenia, you know, my family, you know, was still I still spent three years on the Communism. I'm not that old, but in Eastern Europe intended to be the case that people would trust their family over what they read in the newspaper, because newspaper was controlled by the party modern Americans or perhaps now grappling with the idea that, you know, sometimes politicians, they're not honest and sometimes newspapers and honest.
[00:04:40] Samo Burja Create clip It strikes me as a little bit naive. But then, if you are a very successful society, you can afford to be naive. They even away that less successful societies are often not, and this leads to the great forgetting that we see in the wake of functionality in the wake of functionality. It's possible to take things for granted, and things are not to be taken for granted. Functional institutions are the exception. When things are working very, very well, you will have churches you'll have cos you'll have cities that will outperform their mediocre competition by orders of magnitude. These orders of magnitude are apparent. When you look at something like the number of converts you know, the technology's introduced of the countries conquered, we can look at functionality from a morally neutral perspective. My moral perspective is fundamentally again human. These common human aims the civilized names that we aim for. But functionality itself doesn't really doesn't really have morality baked into it. It's more a neutral observation. It's an observation that the gears and the springs in this particular machine, in this particular hospital or prison or state function they work. They fit together.
[00:06:07] Samo Burja Create clip The alternative to this often is that you can have an institution that on the surface is a company. On the surface is a church. On the surface is an institute, but the real story is that the humans involved or not coordinated and they don't know what they're doing. However, people are very good at imitating each other. So what happens is they have a simple group narrative. There's a simple group narrative that says We are in fact, a hospital or we are a start up. So we're gonna drink the start up coffee and by the start of laptops and, you know, get the start up T shirts and the startup is still not gonna work. It's very easy to have a tribal costume. It's very easy to say the right words. It's very easy to be, you know, Buddy buddy with your friends, and be like, really enthusiastic about thing. But if no one put it together, that's still not a functional institution. Now, in an environment of plenty environment of like a lot of capital, Or perhaps you know, a new over abundance, an over abundance of a certain kind of naivety thing, sort of non functioning institution can still be passed off as a success. But don't be for a second fooled fundamentally, somewhere in society there are functional institutions making that non viable organization viable.
[00:07:28] Samo Burja Create clip Institutions do function calls to the outside. We can think of civilization as you know, complicated ecosystem where constantly functions are being outsourced from one institution from one subculture to another. It has to bottom out somewhere. And in fact it does. And when those are road it, we can have very serious problems. So okay, this is a nice building. This is obviously some kind of government building. We can recognize the visual language in this building right away. Like the origin is clearly Greco Roman. These air are symbols of power, thes air, symbols of knowledge. These are symbols of authority, and they're the ones we've inherited from people we barely understand. We find ourselves in soulless machines we also don't understand. We don't know why we're sitting at that cubicle. Someone knows. Presumably someone presumably designed the highly intricate bureaucracy. But we as individuals, don't have this knowledge. And if we ask the institution itself, the institution itself might lie to us. And if we ask our coworkers, they don't know and they don't care, and they just want to go home. I talked about traditions of knowledge.
[00:08:42] Samo Burja Create clip That was an environment where people were in a machine and this machine might have been functional or nonfunctional, but they didn't know how it was built. If there is no one in the entire corporation or the entire government bureaucracy, honestly at scale, both tend to look very similar. Uh, that knows how it works. That organization is then dealing with, at the very least, a debt tradition, a living tradition of knowledge, or perhaps an academic context. People might be familiar with the concept of ah, lineage in mathematics. There's a very strong effect where the most excellent mathematicians will train disproportionately very excellent mathematicians. In turn, if you look a ts, 1/19 20th century mathematicians, often the most talented, are the students of the most talented. What's happening there is not that, you know, the student is learning to imitate the master. What's happening is a transfer of human development, a transfer of the generators of knowledge, the constant replenishing of knowledge because ultimately knowledge rests in human heads. It is only human minds that operationalize it without human minds to operationalize them, at least for now, at least in the absence of artificial intelligence.
[00:10:03] Samo Burja Create clip What we are doing is performing actions. A bird can fly. A bird does not understand aerodynamics. Our organizations are hospitals are states. They are not birds. They are constructed their machines. So soon is the bird forgets to fly. That's not gonna happen. But the bird might have learned a theory of flight, which is doubtful it could still fly. But if a pilot forgets it how to pilot a plane, the plane crashes. Or maybe the autopilot kicks in and it works for a while. But what about when it comes time to land? What about when lightning hits the cockpit and the auto pilot goes away? So living tradition of knowledge is a pilot that knows how to fly a plane or even better, an engineer that knows how to design a plane. Ah, mathematician that knows how to approve new and interesting theorems and come up with breakthroughs. Ah, philosopher that understands, you know, maybe understands Aristotle, right? Or maybe understands their particular school and contributes to it dynamically. Rather than simply a ping or imitating or wearing the tribal costume. The tribal costume is very easy to wear. Even in academia. The replication prices is interesting. Some people think it's a sign of the weakness of psychology. I'm almost sure is whether it represents a strength of psychology, maybe psychologist. Healthier because in psychology, someone did the replication experiments and found that they were not replicating.
[00:11:40] Samo Burja Create clip Maybe in sociology. No one's even trying to do the replication. What about the other social sciences? How do we know the replication crisis isn't hitting the most honest, rather the least honest of sciences? Now this is me playing around with skepticism. I'm certainly not a big fan of academic psychology dough. I do think that when it comes Thio, you know there are some useful breakthroughs in that in that area, we have learned things about how humans reason and what this were flaws of human reasoning are a dead tradition would then be a tradition where the books are still around. You might have a book written by your teacher by the relevant mathematician, but you have no idea how to improve on the teacher's proofs. You have no idea how to design a new plane, even if you can maintain the old one. And then a lost tradition is something even worse. It's when we even lose the book, and that's certainly something that shows up in human history. We can imagine the course of human civilization as institutions held up by the practical knowledge of their renewal. The renewal has to come every generation, and I do mean like a company generation, not necessarily a biological generation. Monasteries have an easy time reproducing, even though they have no offspring.
[00:13:06] Samo Burja Create clip Um, they recruit recruit. That's how such a tradition can preserve itself. But imagine civilization as a vast field of highly localized knowledge that is difficult to communicate. It's difficult to communicate because there are adversarial games and also because humans have a hard time talking to each other. Remember the tribal costume problem? The tribal costume problem means that it's very easy to trick other people to believe that you understand what they're saying and it feels very good for everyone involved. So you don't really feel the urge to question and the question that is not socially rewarded. Uh, the gap fly. Who questions whether, you know, Do you know what beauty is? Shut up, Socrates, Right? It's a social attack, and that's our problem. Our information transfer is tied to our social accounting, and the social accounting is not actually deep enough and is not running sufficiently deep checks. So we're left with some few exceptional cases of information transfer. A few of these towers of knowledge rise higher than the other ones, and these Tolliver's of knowledge then represent functional institutions that have solved the succession problem that then subsidize all the shallower towers of knowledge.
[00:14:25] Samo Burja Create clip Right now, I'm sure each of us can think of at least three failing American institutions, and we can also still acknowledge that this is one best countries in the world to live. If you're relatively well off, right, First world country is nothing to sneeze at, but, um, it's not being it is being subsidised by something functional dark matter we talked about lost knowledge. Most of our universe is invisible, not literally. We know that Galaxies have far more that mass than the stars that emit light. And we know this because the Galaxies are spinning so fast that they would fly apart unless there was more mass present than what we see. Because there is more mass, we can infer from the gravitational effects that there must be something invisible there. Now, maybe there's something invisible holding our society together in the exact same way a spinning galaxy, intellectual dark matter, I think I think we are standing on a large tower of intellectual dark matter, and some of the dark matter has been lost for good, and some of it is still with us. And sometimes, unfortunately, I think we're living on the fumes of institutions that remain on autopilot. But the knowledge has been lost. Intellectual dark matter is a concept that, as far as I can tell, I've only come up with. It's the observation that even if we cannot investigate the knowledge directly, we can ascertain the knowledge exists just as the invisible mass could be detected through its gravitational effects. A very simple example of this is basically ancient Greek literature, I said, You know, 15% off matter in the universe is visible on detectable or so currently, physics says 13% of known Greek authors. This is ancient Greek authors who we have a name for whose name is referenced. We only have 13% of those works, sort of 2000 known ancient Greek writers. We have 13%. What about the ones we don't know? And you might be thinking 13% pretty good. But actually we only have a smaller fragment off complete works. And by the way, this number would count Aristotle. And we've lost Aristotle's book on economics. We only had his book on politics. You want you know, the one at the start and remember our symbol of authority, intellectual and political, the one with the pillars and the American flags. The American flags air knew the pillars are old and the pillars were held up by something we just don't understand. Civilisational collapse. Well, I've been intimating that with vivid imagery such as, uh, you know, lightning hitting a cockpit. But I think we should also consider the cost of something more subtle. Intellectual, dark age civilisational collapse will have a failure of critical systems is a notable negative symptom. What is a critical system today? Today, it might be our large stockpiles of nuclear weapons in a breakdown of political order in a breakdown of global economic conditions. The machines will still work when we press the button. And the reason we don't press the button is because they're a bunch of very well functioning institutions. Things like the international order, things like the American executive branch, things like strategic command and so on. It's a little bar, I know.
[00:18:10] Samo Burja Create clip But there have been ancient equivalents when the Mongols, you know, made a giant pyramid of skulls naked Baghdad. They also destroyed the irrigation system that had been contained for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The result was famine, and the Mongols, even though they might want a taxable population that can grow, did not have the right engineers to rebuild those systems. And also for a lot of this, that was permanent ecological damage. So even if you rebuild the irrigation system because of the disaster off the thing going away, decertification kicked in right. The area turned into desert, which was previously artificially maintained This is similar in an intellectual dark age, so the failure mode would be different. It might be. Instead of someone pressing the button, it might be that there's a bug in the code, the new code that's written, by the way, we use floppy disks in the I C B M silos. Right? So that's that's, um, legacy code. That's, um, well tested code. So I feel a safer with the floppy disks. Then I would have. They were using something newer, but eventually we're gonna have to go to something newer. So what if the codes bad? So that would be the intellectual, dark age version of a critical systems failure. In the future, we might imagine more exotic ones. We might imagine a society where is outlawed, and then you have overall societal decline. But a local area where knowledge continues to progress so you could have a situation where is essentially band and their institutions enforcing this ban until the alignment problem is solved and then those institutions break up. However, the researchers are now free to do their thing. That would also be a critical systems failure, assuming the hypothesis about the danger of such to college is accurate, then point number two, the loss of traditions of knowledge. I think I've talked about this extensively, but still, because something like Oxford University or something like the Royal Society is embedded into institutions that surround it, it does not necessarily have the ability to sustain itself. The remarkable thing about Christian monasteries in the early Middle Ages was that they sustained themselves completely independently from the surrounding society. Their libraries were not very impressive compared to the library's held by the senatorial class. Even in the fourth century, a D. Roman senators were highly literate and practice classical Latin, and they would occasionally write letters complaining about, You know, the roads are awfully dangerous this year.
[00:20:48] Samo Burja Create clip They did not have a perception that their society was one that's in decline. The Christians were a little bit crazy at that time, but they went into the hills and they set up these Otar kick systems. And in these systems they copied religious texts and as a side effect, also some of the classical texts. Now, of course, we do have to credit Arab civilization in the seventh and eighth century for bringing us some of those poor 13%. But what people forget is that the Arab Empire was a multi faith empire. There were copies made in Baghdad, which was not get burned by the Mongols, is what centuries later, but a large chunk of the Arab literature was copied in Middle Eastern Christian monasteries. Okay, so a monastic tradition preserves probably 80 to 90% of the stuff we have. Because it had a functional institution that did not depend on the other institutions around. It was academia today seem robust to social destruction. If we assume academia is the holder of this, what if it's Silicon Valley would have? Silicon Valley is the holder of technical knowledge and live innovations that robust to the political climate to the social climate.
[00:22:03] Samo Burja Create clip And then number three, we have the destruction of capital. I think human ends air supreme. But I think we should agree that although sequel, it's good for humans to have tools. It's good for humans to have homes and so on and so on. So whenever there's a destruction of wealth, this is a tragedy. Wealth is not bad. You know people. Some people believe in decadence and some people believe you can only create wealth by taking it away from someone else. I think neither is the case. I think all else equal. You can make wealth. You can raise all boats and all else. Equal wealth is not the thing that causes civilisational decadence. And basically the difference here is that with civilisational collapse, there's a sudden massive destruction of capital. And with an intellectual dark age, there is a slow, ongoing, rising opportunity cost. If you want a mental image of the fall of the Roman Empire, you should imagine something like 200 years of GDP shrinking by about 1% a year. That's a more accurate picture than the barbarians burning everything down.
[00:23:11] Samo Burja Create clip And then the last point here is civilisational collapse has the problem of mass death. I'm gonna give an example a little bit later. Some people have questioned that some people have said, Oh, you know, Rome never really fell. What happened was a social transformation. Well, yeah, yeah, it's a transformation, but And when an intellectual dark age, it's the cost of lives, never lived exceptional lives, incredible lives. The cost of the room and dark age is that there were never Romans visiting and sailing around the world that there was never a lively discussion between Greek philosophers and Confucian scholars. The cost of our civilization of lives never lived might be that we can't actually take a vacation on the moon. My dad, when he was something like nine years old and living in a very, you know, an optimistic country. People forget this Communism was optimistic. In the 19 seventies, wrote a simple essay about how well you know extending current trends in economic growth and technological progress. By the time he's a dad, he'll be able to take his kid on a field trip to the movie, right? He didn't take me to the moon. It's It's very disappointing.
[00:24:28] Samo Burja Create clip The Bronze Age collapse. This brings us to mass death, destruction of capital and loss of knowledge. So, just as a raise of hands, who here has heard of the late Bronze Age collapse? Okay, that's recently popularized. When I talked about this about 10 years ago, about five years ago, I got like maybe 12 hands in a in a full room. Even so, the situation is like this in about 1200 BC. We have the my scenes, the minnow ones hit heights, the Assyrians and some other minor tribes here and the famous Egyptians. There's a spring of civilizations that are very different culturally, that are interlocked in a massive network of trade. In particular, the economies of bronze production are such that you have tohave both 10 and copper, cheap in abundant quantities and for various geological reasons. They tend to not be found in the same sentiments. So nature necessitated trade, and they also developed a sophisticated international community of their own era. It's very game of Thrones like you have, like Egyptians writing to the hit heights and the Hittites writing back there like you should marry my son. But I haven't heard from my daughter if she's still alive. Oh yeah, she's totally alive and so on.
[00:25:51] Samo Burja Create clip If anyone wants to. If anyone's to read this, I recommend the book, the Amarna letters. Amarna is a place in Egypt where they found diplomatic correspondences. Some of the intellectual dark matter was an earth right, and it turned out they had sophisticated things such as peace treaties, loans and, you know, the hostage technology s o. The little red exes here are destroyed cities. Thes air cities that have a layer off charge burned remains between again 1211 50 BC So there was a massive wave of destruction through these civilizations thes nominally politically independent kingdoms with their independent culture in their own language that were engaged in this fruitful exchange that, you know, it was bigger than any one country and they went away in a 50 year period. This should remind us of our own fragility. What happened Waas. As soon as international trade was disrupted, copper 10 could not be mixed and the result was the price of bronze skyrocketed. Imperial treasuries were emptied and it didn't make sense to build new ships. It was better to describe the ships for local use or repurpose them for defensive measures as both local rebellions and barbarian invasions seat. Then we don't even know what actually caused the systemic collapse of the late Bronze Age. But the important point is that today we are hyper centralized, we're dependent for energy and we're dependent for CP use. CBO production currently can on Lee be economical because of the massive economies of scale. If global trade was notably disrupted with a catastrophic event similar to the late Bronze Age collapse would have to go back to older computing technology, things that can be economical. It I don't know, 50 million people. Then the question is, what would be economical at 500,000 people, maybe would even just lose all sea views.
[00:27:58] Samo Burja Create clip This is Agamemnon Ons Mask. Who here knows who Agamemnon is and personally, is probably not his mask. It's about 200 years older, but a very fanciful 19th century. Our killer just thought that it was Agamemnon. Um, this is from my CIA mind, CIA. For about 200 years after products like this were produced, there were no city states, no cities and no products like this. In mainland Greece, the Greek dark age was a period where they lost writing. There was just no continuity. The writing system that we know of as classical Greek is very different from linear and linear B, which were the Minoan and Mason writing systems Before then. We have the Roman example a swell. The Roman example is nearly one and 1/2 1000 years later, and it's not a straightforward collapse case that people talk about the fall of the Roman Empire. Here we have a technological artifact that could not be replicated until the 20th century. This is the like Fergus Cup. Curtis was the law giver of Sparta, like Curtis wanted the Spartans to be tough, and so he banned wine. And here is the God pan, punishing him by having binds attack like Curtis for his sin of outlawing. You know, the sacred liquid.
[00:29:19] Samo Burja Create clip But the interesting part here is that this is a single cup. It's a chronic cup, which means that if you shine light from the front, it's gonna be green. And if you shine light from the back, it's going to be read. This is achieved through very finely ground particles of silver and gold at the Nana Leader scale, mixed in precise quantities into the glass itself. When this cup before this cup was found in the 18th century, in those 13% off remaining writing, there were references to cups like this, and 18th and 19th century scholars said the Romans air being fanciful. Of course, they don't have cups that change color. That's ridiculous. We don't have cups to change color, and then they found one of these in a monastery and I think France late 19th century and had no idea how it worked. And then, ah, lab in 19 seventies Britain figured out how it worked. And the lab is very insistent that this must have been some kind of fluke, that they definitely didn't know what they were doing.
[00:30:18] Samo Burja Create clip And, you know, think about how many cups air produced, where the odds that we would have a fluke preserved rather than something that was mass produced. Mass produced items are things we find. If today our civilization ends, we would not have your future. Archaeologists would not find the Saturn five that would not find the Apollo rocket. They would find jet airplanes, but that's because they're mass produced their many copies. And because of the large quantity probabilistic lee, even a few centuries or thousands of years later, one of them is preserved that may be found. They would find the lunar module. That's a good point. But then they would have to go to the moon. And you know, when the ancients say that they went to the moon there being fanciful, we all know the Americans. So the Lakers this cup was an example of a technology that was lost for over 1000 years? No, it was also produced in the fourth century A. D. The fourth century A. D is already pretty far along this dick rant decline trendline. So it's a very small economy compared to its peak. We can measure part of the economic output of the Roman Empire through atmospheric lead.
[00:31:32] Samo Burja Create clip Lead goes into the atmosphere, the winds blow it over the ocean in the Atlantic, and it settles on the ice of Greenland. And over this layer, new Isis formed in the small air bubbles trapped in Greenland ice. There is a sample of the atmosphere, including its lead content, which is basically pollution for hundreds, if not thousands of years into the past. And when we analyze thes, we find a massive decline in Roman production. And as you can see, it's an ongoing decline rather than a sudden crash. And the internal story of the Roman Empire was that, Yeah, we've had some bad times, but everything is great now, like over and over again. The political propaganda insists that things are looking up, that the economic outputs are going to improve that political stability is around the corner now. This brings us to mass death. The Han Dynasty is the golden native age of China. It's contemporary to the Roman Empire. So the second and third century 80 however, Thea Yellow turban rebellion ends this and starts off a serious of catastrophic wars where over the course of the century, the population of Han China is reduced by 2/3.
[00:32:53] Samo Burja Create clip This is a population of 200 million people. There was starvation, and there's killing. I have, um, two posts online that described what I call empire theory. Empire theory is not strictly about empires in the political sense or civilizations. It's more a general theory of organization. So it's a technical term I use for areas of coordination. And one of the feces I have is that there are two fundamental architectures for both growth and decline. There is, Thesent realized, expanding empire when the central institutions of society are the ones that are functional and they're highly centralized and have a lot of capital available and make large investments that payoff that allow the system to continue to grow and renew itself. Then there is the decentralized, expanding empire where the central power might in fact even be dysfunctional. So, for example, you could imagine a system where AH, government is dysfunctional, but cos they're functional, by the way. That's the normal story about the American system. But I don't think that's how the American system actually works. I think a better example would be, say, 19th century Britain, where arguably the British government is not that competent. But many, many individuals are very competent, though again their ethics. We can question that at times and then on the decline side, the Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire is a centralized, declining empire. The central power is strong but does not know how to renew the foundations of society. So what it does is cannibalize his political opposition. Over and over again, the Romans are busy fighting each other in civil wars over and over again, until their ability to maintain the western Mediterranean is gone, and a decentralized, declining empire is more of the usual decentralization fragmentation thing. People imagine you have the collapse of central authority like that in the late Hon Dynasty, with lots of local fiefdom is breaking off, and lots of small, not very well built institutions springing up that are worse than the original. What about the future? This is a very history oriented talk, but that's because I see no fundamental difference between the past, the present and the future. These air divisions yesterday, today, tomorrow that are a consequence of the human experience and of the limits of human knowledge. They're not features of reality itself.
[00:35:27] Samo Burja Create clip If you have a theory of society. Sure, the inputs into the theory change today, tomorrow or yesterday, but it should be the same theory. Wouldn't be strange of different laws of physics applied in the eighth century or the 20th century or the 25th century. We need an explanation for why that is the case. And whenever people flip between, theories of society are gonna have one theory of society for the past, where a part of the past they really like another theory for the present and a completely fantastical theory for the future. I think that looking at the past, the present and the future, we learn things for all of them. Good futurists should in fact be good historians. Good sociologists of today should end up being good futurists, but few people make that mental leap. I think we will have to because I believe that we need to recover the intellectual dark matter of our own contemporary society. There are a number off crucial traditions that have in fact, been broken. Let me rephrase. I'm gonna use the term lineage right there. Number of crucial intellectual lineages that have been broken. That means that several institutions in our society are now incapable of renewing themselves or rebuilding themselves.
[00:36:47] Samo Burja Create clip And this does not mean that automatically people outside of those institutions know how to build replacements. So even if you have an adversarial frame of mind where you're like, Oh, it's good that the government is failing, it doesn't mean you know what to do what you should do. Or even if someone is like, Oh, yeah, I'm glad the company screwed up. The government's gonna step it. No, no, it's not gonna do a good job. I fundamentally just want someone to do a good job. I want the institutions to be functional and whether it's a centralized or decentralized architecture. Er, that's a pragmatic question. Thank you.
