When You Meet the Worthy, Aspire to Their Example

When the internet first became part of everyday life, people often repeated a line from a 1993 New Yorker cartoon: on the internet, nobody knows you are a dog. At the time, the joke captured the anonymity of online identity. Today the uncertainty goes further. We may not know what kind of person is at the other end of the connection, and increasingly we may not even know whether there is a person there at all. Even when we are confident that a post was written by a human being, we usually know little about that person's age, education, experience or professional background. Nor do we know the circumstances in which a particular sentence was written.

This uncertainty has changed the conditions under which we read, but our emotional habits have not necessarily caught up. We still tend to treat a sentence on a screen as if it represented a whole person, and a fragment as if it were a complete system of thought. We invest emotion in it, argue with it seriously, and sometimes imagine that one exchange might correct the person behind it. Yet the sentence may have been written casually by a school student, by someone with little knowledge or experience, or by a person forwarding material stripped of its original context. It may also have been produced by an AI system responding to a prompt. What confronts us is not always a coherent thinker with whom a serious exchange is possible. Sometimes it is merely an orphaned piece of information, lacking context, responsibility and any real prospect of further discussion.

As we grow older and accumulate experience, our judgement generally becomes more developed. Claims that once seemed novel, difficult or profound may later reveal their conceptual confusion and logical gaps almost immediately. The internet can therefore appear to contain an ever-increasing amount of foolish, absurd and low-quality material. Part of that impression may not mean that the outside world has suddenly deteriorated. It may be the natural result of our improved ability to recognise weaknesses that were already there. An adult entering a discussion among primary school students will inevitably find many of their statements immature. The important question is not why children fail to speak like adults. It is why an adult would spend so much time proving that difference.

For that reason, most low-quality information does not deserve much concern, and certainly does not require a serious response every time. Ignoring something is not necessarily arrogant, nor is it an evasion of disagreement. Deciding that a claim is not worth further investment is itself an exercise of judgement. Time, attention and emotional energy are limited resources. Every moment of anger, rebuttal and argument gives an item of information additional psychological weight. Online platforms then interpret our pauses, clicks and replies as signs of interest and deliver more of the same. We may believe we are resisting absurdity while our attention is actually feeding it and allowing it to occupy more of our information environment.

There is, however, another side to the problem. If a person continually sees only the foolishness of others, it may not mean that his own understanding is still advancing. It may mean that his thinking is becoming rigid. Age and experience can improve judgement, but they also create settled habits, concepts and explanatory frameworks. Stability allows us to deal with familiar problems more efficiently, yet it can reduce our curiosity about unfamiliar things. We become quicker at placing new information into old categories and more inclined to say that it is merely another version of something we already know. Sometimes this is an accurate diagnosis. At other times, experience is simply refusing a new possibility on our behalf.

However varied a person's life and work may be, the environment in which he has direct experience remains limited. The internet expands the range of available information, but it does not automatically expand lived experience. Most of what reaches us through a screen is indirect. It has been selected, edited and expressed in a form that shows only one side or one moment. Chinese communication in particular often depends heavily on context, relationships, tone and what was said before and after. Removed from its original setting, a sentence can easily appear blunt, dogmatic or even absurd. The discomfort we sometimes feel when reading online material does not always prove that the other person has nothing worthwhile to say. We may simply lack the relevant background, or the writer may not have been able to compress a complex experience into a paragraph capable of standing on its own.

Reading online therefore requires two judgements to be held at the same time. First, we should not treat every piece of poor information as a serious idea demanding a reply. Anonymous, incomplete or machine-generated material should not be allowed to consume unlimited attention. Second, the abundance of poor material should not persuade us that our own intellectual position is exceptionally high. Nor should we mistake habitual dismissal for maturity. It is easy to notice who knows less than we do. The harder task is to recognise who can see further in a particular area, and to acknowledge the distance between that person's understanding and our own.

The phrase jian xian si qi, usually understood as aspiring to equal those who are worthy, comes from the Analects, in the chapter known as Li Ren. Confucius says that when we meet someone worthy, we should think of becoming their equal, and when we meet someone unworthy, we should examine ourselves inwardly. In a modern setting, the worthy person need not be imagined only as a moral sage, and aspiring to equality does not require copying an entire personality. The principle can be read more practically. When we encounter sounder judgement, firmer knowledge, broader experience or clearer expression, we should do more than agree. We should ask what our own thinking lacks and whether that capability can become part of our own intellectual structure. The second half of the saying matters just as much. When we encounter a failing in someone else, the point is not contempt or attack, but self-examination: does the same problem exist in us in another form?

The principle changes the direction of comparison. The internet constantly invites comparison with those below us. If we scroll for long enough, we can always find someone more extreme, less informed or more confused, and gain an inexpensive sense of intellectual superiority. The feeling is pleasant, but it produces little growth. Upward comparison works differently. It exposes our limits. That may be uncomfortable, but it also reveals a genuine direction for learning. Only by comparing ourselves with people whose understanding, experience or methods are stronger in a particular field can we see which layer is still missing from our own judgement.

The word worthy should not, however, be treated as a permanent status. A celebrated scholar may deserve close attention within her own field and still speak carelessly on another subject. An unknown person may have gained remarkably accurate understanding through decades of practice. The relevant question is not who stands above whom in every respect. It is who, on this particular issue, offers the more dependable understanding. Aspiring to the worthy is not a search for idols, and it does not mean surrendering judgement to authority. It means recognising a local but genuine cognitive advantage.

This distinction becomes even more important when AI participates in the production of content. High-quality expression is not necessarily produced entirely by a person, just as poor expression is not necessarily produced by a machine. Judgement cannot stop at the identity of the author. It must return to the content itself. Can the facts be checked? Are the concepts used consistently? Does the reasoning hold together? Are the sources dependable? Does the conclusion acknowledge the limits within which it applies? At the same time, provenance still matters because responsibility, lived experience and real intention cannot be inferred from fluent prose alone. We should neither trust a passage merely because it sounds human nor reject it automatically because AI helped produce it.

In the present information environment, practising jian xian si qi begins as a discipline of attention. Poor material should receive only the minimum judgement required, rather than being allowed to occupy our emotions and thought for hours. Authors, studies, works and sources of experience that consistently show high quality deserve the opposite treatment. We should increase our exposure to them, give them more time, follow their reasoning, understand their background and incorporate into our own knowledge only what survives examination. The supply of information is effectively unlimited, while human attention remains finite. The shape of a person's thought is determined to a considerable degree by those to whom that attention is repeatedly given.

Maturity does not mean finding everything absurd, nor does it mean losing interest in what is new. A more reliable maturity can ignore ineffective noise while retaining the ability to discover serious thought. It is not easily carried away by an unfamiliar claim, but neither does it allow established experience to block every unfamiliar claim at the door. When we encounter someone who knows less, we need not rush to prove our superiority. When we encounter someone more perceptive, we need not rush to defend our pride. The first encounter can often be released. The second is worth approaching.

In the networked age, aspiring to the worthy is not an abstract maxim of self-cultivation. It reminds us that the crucial ability is not the ability to refute every error, but the ability to allocate attention. Growth does not come from repeatedly confirming what we already know. It comes from recognising from whom we can still learn. The internet will always contain absurdity, and it will always contain people who can see further than we can. Whether our understanding continues to develop depends less on how much foolishness we identify than on whether we remain willing to seek out what is genuinely worth learning from, and then move one step closer to it.