I Turned Mao's Selected Works into a Skill

Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. —Lenin, What Is to Be Done?

---

I turned the Selected Works into a Skill.

The idea first came from my friend DC. Since I joined the "Between the Lines" group, I seem to have gotten several people, including DC and Liang, to start reading the Selected Works of Mao Zedong.

For me that's an honor, because I recommend this book to everyone from the bottom of my heart.

DC does in-depth AI research, and he told me more than once that I should turn the Selected Works of Mao Zedong into a Skill. It would be a really interesting thing to do.

The first time I heard the suggestion, I found it fun. Combining the Selected Works with AI across fields is something really fresh, and if it helped more people see how compelling and practical the book is, that couldn't be a bad thing.

DC brought it up a few more times after that. A long while back, I made a demo with Claude. But once it was made, I didn't test it myself and no friends tested it for me either. My enthusiasm only went so far, so it fizzled out.

What really got me to take it seriously was starting my column, Life Lessons from Mao's Selected Works. I started thinking about what part of the Selected Works matters most to me, and in the end I settled on materialist dialectics.

So I defined the core of the column as: a column that takes apart and explains what materialist dialectics in the Selected Works means. At the same time, I thought of the Skill I'd written before. When I wrote it, I built it on analyzing things with materialist dialectics, and now that fit perfectly with my column.

What does analyzing things with materialist dialectics mean? It's really a method: looking at problems from the dialectical-materialist point of view, seeing the contradictions and connections between things, and then analyzing different problems with different lines of argument.

Some of the laws it commonly uses are:

• The law of the unity of opposites: grasping universality and particularity
• The viewpoint of practice: putting practice first and following the path of knowledge "practice—knowledge—practice"
• The law of the transformation of quantity into quality
• The law of the negation of the negation
• Opposing subjectivity, one-sidedness, and superficiality, and overcoming dogmatism

These words and phrases are actually common in real life, but put this way they're too abstract to help people put them into practice or understand them.

AI is a very handy tool here. It can apply the logic of materialist dialectics directly to analyze problems. The user just needs to write up their question and send it to the AI, and the AI will analyze it on the basis of materialist dialectics.

Take the question in the image below: how do I make AI my copilot? Here's how the AI trained with my Skill answered:

Not only does it break the question down concretely, at the end it also explains why it broke it down that way and what methods of analysis it used, so people can see more clearly: so this is how materialist dialectics is used.

Materialist dialectics has never really been anything unfathomably deep. It's just a method for analyzing things. It's only that too many people get headaches from abstract, dry theory and don't want to go near it.

But in fact, materialist dialectics puts special stress on the importance of practice.

Even if you read the whole Selected Works of Mao Zedong, if you don't apply its thinking and methods to your own life, it's all for nothing.

So my view is: study materialist dialectics in theory, and even more, use it in practice.

An AI driven by a Skill I wrote is a great tool for that.

You can use it to analyze concrete problems, and at the same time pick up some of the thinking of materialist dialectics. Starting down that path, you can keep deepening your grasp of materialist dialectics and your experience using it.

Meanwhile, my column, Life Lessons from Mao's Selected Works, comes at it from theory: from taking apart the original text of the Selected Works, to examples from life, to materialist dialectics, so readers can learn the theory of materialist dialectics in a more relaxed way.

This way, I've created two things that complement each other:

• Life Lessons from Mao's Selected Works helps people learn materialist dialectics in theory
• The "Materialist Dialectics AI Q&A Tool" lets people feel and experience firsthand, in practice, how materialist dialectics analyzes problems

Working on both fronts at once seems to me a really good form.

And because practice matters so much, I take this Q&A tool very seriously. Its foundation is the Skill I wrote, so polishing and optimizing the Skill has been my top priority lately.

Now, compared with the first version I released on Monday, after a week of optimizing, the Skill has become much more useful and easier to work with, though it still has its shortcomings. But watching this thing grow bit by bit in my hands, sometimes I really feel it's like a living person.

Being able to create a product like this makes me really happy.