(this is one of the hypotheses that Plato has his Socrates examine and then reject in the Theaetetus, but it is catchy enough that everyone has collectively decided that Plato believed it)
> In many ways, modern people are less weird than we think we are. A lot of ideas that we think of as “modern” were first developed thousands of years ago. When we generalize about what happened in The Past (TM), we’re often projecting the conflicts of our own society, not taking past societies on their own terms.
It's true that generalizations about The Past are often projection, but the Mohists seem like an even better illustration of another problem: generalizations about the past are often generalizations about *elites* in the past. Often elites were the only ones who could write, and even when other people managed to write stuff down preserving writing was expensive so stuff that aligned with elite attitudes was more likely to be preserved, and even when anti-elite writings survive they often fail to make it into the canon of Stuff Everyone Should Read. How many Westerners, when they decide they need an antidote to to their Eurocentric education, are going to get swiftly directed to Mozi as someone they need to read?
I love the Mohists. I made a Mohist RPG character for an Ars Magica campaign, and I've been working on a D&D campaign that involves playing as a Mohist-inspired mercenary band / peacekeeping force. I especially enjoy the game theory logic of "what if we became combat badasses and made attacking people really hard and costly?" I enjoyed seeing a solid writeup of their philosophy and attitudes. It warms the cockles of my militant heart.
The thing that makes me convinced there are time travelers is that earlier this week a friend of mine was looking for the Mohism post she was sure you’d written
did you write about mozi a few months ago? i was just talking with a friend a few days ago about mohism and remembered that some rationalist writer did
>Much of Mohist thought has parallels in modern effective altruist thought, but thinking of knowledge as a skill doesn’t. Would it be a useful framing?
It sounds to me like frequentism, aka the notion that to know something you need to conduct an experiment.
The "knowledge as skill" thing seems a lot like the Baconian "knowledge is power": knowledge is defined as the ability to achieve desired ends. This is also sort of the concept of the modern scientific method, where theories are considered true to the extent that they reliably predict what will happen under specified conditions; if two theories always make the same predictions they are considered equivalent even if their model for why these things happen is different.
FYI Plato very much does not endorse the justified true belief model of knowledge either.
(this is one of the hypotheses that Plato has his Socrates examine and then reject in the Theaetetus, but it is catchy enough that everyone has collectively decided that Plato believed it)
> In many ways, modern people are less weird than we think we are. A lot of ideas that we think of as “modern” were first developed thousands of years ago. When we generalize about what happened in The Past (TM), we’re often projecting the conflicts of our own society, not taking past societies on their own terms.
It's true that generalizations about The Past are often projection, but the Mohists seem like an even better illustration of another problem: generalizations about the past are often generalizations about *elites* in the past. Often elites were the only ones who could write, and even when other people managed to write stuff down preserving writing was expensive so stuff that aligned with elite attitudes was more likely to be preserved, and even when anti-elite writings survive they often fail to make it into the canon of Stuff Everyone Should Read. How many Westerners, when they decide they need an antidote to to their Eurocentric education, are going to get swiftly directed to Mozi as someone they need to read?
I love the Mohists. I made a Mohist RPG character for an Ars Magica campaign, and I've been working on a D&D campaign that involves playing as a Mohist-inspired mercenary band / peacekeeping force. I especially enjoy the game theory logic of "what if we became combat badasses and made attacking people really hard and costly?" I enjoyed seeing a solid writeup of their philosophy and attitudes. It warms the cockles of my militant heart.
The thing that makes me convinced there are time travelers is that earlier this week a friend of mine was looking for the Mohism post she was sure you’d written
It's minor, but you should probably at least put a footnote clarification on the Plato and justified true belief thing.
did you write about mozi a few months ago? i was just talking with a friend a few days ago about mohism and remembered that some rationalist writer did
I didn't but also I've been talking about them incessantly!
>Much of Mohist thought has parallels in modern effective altruist thought, but thinking of knowledge as a skill doesn’t. Would it be a useful framing?
It sounds to me like frequentism, aka the notion that to know something you need to conduct an experiment.
The "knowledge as skill" thing seems a lot like the Baconian "knowledge is power": knowledge is defined as the ability to achieve desired ends. This is also sort of the concept of the modern scientific method, where theories are considered true to the extent that they reliably predict what will happen under specified conditions; if two theories always make the same predictions they are considered equivalent even if their model for why these things happen is different.
Great post, fascinating topic!
Related/relevant: "Mohism, Ruism, and Effective Altruism" https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xlGJ8_mV2vRB8ig1jIqsdWVPFcoNQXqYxBeBWc08NzE/edit?usp=sharing
> gave them life in hte first place
>these rituals are traditional, so they should be practice.
Typos