Over the New Year I sat talking with a friend about the question 'What kind of person do you think you are?' I said I was someone who once tried to run his emotional modules through a utility calculation. He did not ask what I meant. I assumed he understood; he switched to his own self-assessment. Later, when we got to specifics, I explained that I used to analyze an emotional act before performing it, estimating how much 'return' it would bring.
The example I gave him was a rental arrangement from college. I took over a lease from an older student. To avoid exposing the sublet, I paid the rent into her bank card at first. I knew she was taking a 400-yuan cut. For the first six months I paid the extra 400 every month to keep the arrangement stable and make sure she would introduce me to the landlord when the contract ended. On the day I signed with the landlord, I deleted and blocked her. Her 'function' was over. She went around saying I had no conscience, that I used her and threw her away.
I was not in a hurry. She was on the school Youth League committee, and I had no direct way to fight that kind of hierarchical power. So when I later had a decent relationship with the department head, I asked her to restore my reputation—otherwise the story of her taking the cut would circulate alongside the story of my ingratitude. After that she never bothered me again.
After I told my friend this, he looked puzzled.
'Wait—what you are describing sounds more like utilitarianism.'
'Yeah. So?'
'I do not think you are a utility-ist. You are more of a utilitarian.'
'Isn't utility-ism just utilitarianism?'
'No. Utilitarianism is utilitarianism.'
I had been using 'utility-ism' as a softer label, a translation someone once gave me. He kept insisting on 'utilitarianism.' To me they sounded like synonyms; to him the distinction mattered.
I first received the keyword 'utility-ism' when the Shanghai death experience museum was still open. I made it to the second-to-last checkpoint. I used my utilitarian method to steer the public-opinion field so that participants turned on each other, and in the end the facilitator gave me that word. She thought 'utilitarianism' was too blunt, so she used a translated version to soften the act of definition. I do not think it is a bad word. For my first thirty years, that is who I was. The other participants simply felt it was a cold quality.
When I explained this to my friend, he seized on the word and argued that utilitarianism and utility-ism are not the same thing. The conversation got derailed. A few days ago I read a blogger friend's post 'On Wording,' which advocated precise word choice, and it closed the loop.
I dislike what AI has done to semantics (though by the standard of precision I should say LLM). It often invents new words by arranging literal meanings—recombining two words that could be understood literally. That is one of the most visible details for judging whether an article had AI involvement. So I keep asking AI whether a coinage is just a combination or has an actual source. These exchanges usually end with the AI apologizing. I am that persistent when we talk about dog care, health, or rebutting an argument. But with literature and imaginative collisions, I prefer Gemini, with its hallucination rate. I let it combine words freely; that chemical process is part of the blank space left for deconstruction.
Of all the AIs, only Gemini understood every easter egg I hid in that novel. Hallucination rate really is the key to filling a novel's blank spaces; humans fill in blanks the same way.
— Möbius Strip World
So I agree with Eltrac's insistence on sincere writing and precise wording. It is an individual choice of self-discipline. But in literary writing, I would rather people lie and be 'insincere.'
The sentence in that essay that bothered me was this: 'There is no need to bring the toxic part of the internet into writing, and still less into reality.' I think this is a little arrogant. It is a textbook straw man: first it equates nonstandard wording with 'the toxic part of the internet,' an emotional equivalence; then it uses a slippery slope, assuming that nonstandard online language leads to that toxicity; then it attacks the straw man to make the argument stand. The line was borrowed from someone else, so the straw man was set up by the original author's position anyway. Theory itself has a hard time escaping the power of ownership.
I went back to my argument with my friend. I asked, 'What is the point of arguing?' He said, 'Rigor.' I asked, 'If I used the word wrong, does everything I said before become wrong?' He thought I was shifting the concept and being contrarian, and ended the conversation.
Later, after we calmed down, we made a rule: we would stop arguing about theoretical right and wrong. We would just talk. When something was unclear or ambiguous, we would ask each other and tune to the same frequency. That question would not be a judgment about ignorance or theoretical deficiency. So our topic went back to 'ourselves.'
This time we identified each other's arrogance. He always tries to correct my definitions. I always replace precise expression with literary expression. For him, nitpicking is a form of power, because he is a teacher. For me, affectation is also a form of power: I can preserve the 'blank space' to avoid robbing others of imagination, or use the ambiguity of a conclusion to provoke conflict.
For example, he thinks 'Form' should be the eternal concept behind the sensory world. I explained by analogy that 'Form' is 'the cup in your head when you have not seen an actual cup.' He thought that was extremely imprecise. I thought I had made the abstract concept clear. After making sure there was no false dilemma (forcing a complex problem into two extreme opposites) and no appeal to elitism (not attacking the person directly but attacking their 'cognitive level'), we found a balance between abstract and concrete: theory is extremely arrogant, especially when we need to cite classics to persuade others.
Finally, we 'Formed' ourselves—looked at ourselves from an objective angle to understand how we had become what we are step by step. He told a past he did not like to mention, but it restored the reason behind his arrogance.
In middle school, his essays were often chosen as high-scoring essays. He had to take his test paper and read it aloud on the podium to the whole class, sometimes to other classes. At first he thought it was a great honor. But soon doubts appeared. Someone questioned his nonstandard wording; someone questioned his metaphors; someone questioned his overreading of allusions; until someone questioned a single punctuation mark and used that to deny the entire essay—and even him.
A Form does not collapse, but the arrogance of theory can turn it into a straw man with no way to fight back.