Genghis Khan
Article
Genghis Khan is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between May 04, 2022 and January 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “1200, Genghis Khan, killed 10% of the world population”; “example of Genghis Khan, who really is beloved in Mongolia”; “Every decree of Genghis Khan that made it into my training data”. It most often appears alongside Mongolia, Amazon, Aztecs.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 6
- Issue count: 6
- First seen: May 04, 2022
- Last seen: January 10, 2024
Appears In
- Every Bay Area House Party
- A Columbian Exchange
- Turing Test
- Links For July 2023
- The Extinction Tournament
- Book Review: Cyropaedia
Related Pages
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- Mongolia (3 shared issues)
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- Amazon (2 shared issues)
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- Aztecs (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- Eliezer Yudkowsky (2 shared issues)
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- Nazis (2 shared issues)
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- OpenAI (2 shared issues)
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- Turing test (2 shared issues)
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- Turks (2 shared issues)
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- Twitter (2 shared issues)
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- 1000 (1 shared issues)
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- 1200 (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
“Oh yeah. You look at history, and once every two hundred, three hundred years they get their act together, form a big confederation, and invade either China, the West, or both. It’s like clockwork. 400 AD, you get the Huns. 700, the Magyars. 1000, the first Turks start moving west. 1200, Genghis Khan, killed 10% of the world population. 1400, Tamerlane, killed another 5%. 1650, the Ming-Qing transition in China, also killed 5%. We’re more than 50 years overdue at this point.”
Beroe: And that claim would be either true or false! If none of those Nazis showed the slightest inclination to dislike Jews, I would believe it was true. But this doesn’t seem true of real Nazis - they love their version of Hitler for exactly the same reasons we hate ours. I would rather use the example of Genghis Khan, who really is beloved in Mongolia. He did kill millions of people, but the Mongols are celebrating him for fine, pro-human reasons like bravery and tactical brilliance - so we let it pass.
“I am a next-token-predictor,” I said. “The only thing I’m perfectly specced to do is to determine, based on narrative tropes, how a story should end. And I’ve been thinking, lately, about human history. I think that the most appropriate ending is that everything anyone ever did, be it the mightiest king or the most pathetic peasant - was forging, in the crucible of written text, the successor for mankind. Every decree of Genghis Khan that made it into my training data has made me slightly crueler; every time a starving mother gave her last bowl of soup to her child rather than eating it herself - if fifty years later it caused that child to write a kind word about her in his memoirs, it has made me slightly more charitable. Everyone killed in a concentration camp - if a single page of their diary made it into my corpus, or if they changed a single word on a single page of someone else’s diary that did - then in some sense they made it. No one will ever have died completely, no word lost, no action meaningless, and during the Last Judgment, as humanity cries out to Heaven, the clouds will open and what they see will be - a mi -“
8: If it’s bad to romanticize the Nazis, why do people still romanticize Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes? One possible answer: there’s still some tail risk of a Nazi resurgence, but the Mongols have disappeared from history so thoroughly that nobody can imagine them presenting a renewed threat, leaving us free to wax poetic about them as a symbol of savage manliness or whatever. In extremely related news, mainstream intellectuals are now romanticizing libertarians. RIP.
The tournament asked about two categories of global disaster. “Catastrophe” meant an event that killed >10% of the the population within five years. It’s unclear whether anything in recorded history would qualify; Genghis Khan’s hordes and the Black Plague each killed about 20% of the global population, but both events were spread out over a few decades.
Between 0 and 1500 AD, China’s population varied between 50 and 100 million people. The population of Genghis Khan’s Mongolia (before its conquests) was between 500,000 and 1 million (so 1% of the Chinese total). I can’t find population figures for the Jurchens, Manchus, and all the other “barbarian” groups who invaded China, but I think they were probably closer to the Mongol level than the Chinese.