The title comes from a paper I happened to read this afternoon, published at KDD 2025. It is so absurd a title that one cannot help but smile at it.

Over dinner I asked her whether absolute egoism and absolute altruism might in fact be two sides of the same coin. She paused for a moment, shook her head in a vaguely noncommittal way, and in the end answered me with silence.

It reminded me of a blog post I read sometime toward about the end of 2023. It asked whether love might be the smallest unit of communism, whether the essence of love lies in giving without expecting anything in return. At the time I think I believed it—though perhaps with a certain quiet pessimism. It is a kind of utopian imagination: we seek the Kingdom of Heaven, yet heaven cannot truly be built upon the earth.

To me, love may be a kind of tacit intrusion. An intrusion into my private time, into my private space, into everything that belongs to me. Life, after all, becomes interesting precisely through those otherwise uneventful days. In almost everything we do there is some form of seeking: at school we seek grades, at work we seek performance.

But in love, what exactly are we seeking? I do not know, just as she answered me with silence. Perhaps once I could have said, quite calmly, that it is not so. That love is not the art of asking but the art of giving; that we offer love simply for the joy of the other. Now, however, silence is all I seem able to offer. Or perhaps giving itself is already a form of asking. I expect that you will accept what I give you—does that expectation itself become an intrusion? An intrusion into you? It begins to resemble an endless Möbius strip.

When I pray to God, what exactly am I asking for? Even if I were to repeat ten thousand times that I ask nothing of Jehovah, that I merely give thanks for the love He has already granted me—does the very act still remain a kind of asking? She says that I think too much, that I keep winding myself into a rather pitiful abyss.

Perhaps our world really does need a little more LLM. Oh LLM, I’m asking Thee—please give me a decision tree.

10/03/2026
Beijing