University of Oxford Is Older Than the Aztec Empire and Other Facts of History (2013)

"The year 2024 is closer in time to Cleopatra than the Egyptian queen’s life was to the construction of the pyramids."

It's truly astonishing how old Egypt is. The sphinx is 4500 years old! I listened to Bob Brier's course on ancient Egypt (from TGC) and it was mind-blowing.

I wish this silly "gotcha" fact about Oxford being older than the Aztecs would go away.

All it's saying is that most people don't know enough about Mesoamerican civilizations to differentiate clearly between the Aztec and the Maya; the Maya have been around since long before Oxford and that's why people anchor 'the Aztecs' in the distant past. This should be pretty obvious.

It's like saying "Did you know that the Aztec Empire is older than the University of Reading" -- yeah, that's not what most people are thinking of when they think of an old English university.

I don't want to contradict the thesis of the article though, it's true that our perception is skewed. My favorite version of this is that Chinese armies were fighting each other with gunpowder-based weapons in the 1100s.

I remember walking around Oxford and seeing "New College" with the date of 1379

https://x.com/waitbutwhy/status/1292882798982967296/photo/1

I hope that before I shuffle off we have agents that can emulate these people with subtlety and depth, and I can invite them over for long chats. Have them available as podcast guests. Assign high school students to interview them. Face them off in ideological cage matches. Learn first hand from them about the plasticity of human ethics and culture. Hire Beethoven as a piano teacher, Faraday as a lab assistant, Machiavelli as a wartime consiglieri. But it can only work so far as the agents know the limits of their own training data and not make shit up.