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gwern comments on How minimal is our intelligence? - Less Wrong
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What civilization-wide infrastructure did the Mongols destroy in the process of creating the greatest land empire in history which then doomed them and limited their spread?
The mongols were emphatically not barbarians, they introduced systems that were in most cases improvements over what they destroyed.
I suspect the connotations of "barbarian" are getting in the way here. The Mongols were highly mobile pastoralists and raiders; this did not get in the way of setting up sophisticated and creative institutions. (Nor did the latter undo the considerable net loss in poulation and extent of cultivation that accompanied the Mongol conquests.)