In the Age of AI, the Most Important Human Ability: Taste

(Also a Survival Guide for Market Crashes)

On days when the market is crashing, three things become extremely cheap: predictions, emotions, and certainty.

When everyone is asking the same question—
“Is this the bottom?”—
then it is almost certainly not the bottom.

In front of an AI prompt, there is nothing new under the sun. Any “bottom-buying strategy” that can be formalized, scaled, and learned by AI will become useless the moment humans start asking about it.

In the AI era, the most important human ability is not creativity, nor predicting trends.

It is taste.

A Story About Video Games

At a family gathering during the Lunar New Year, several older relatives were complaining about their kids being addicted to video games and how it was affecting their schoolwork.

I was sitting quietly nearby thinking:

As if not playing games automatically means you’ll get good grades…

At some point the conversation turned to me, because apparently I used to be a serious gaming addict as a kid. They asked what they should do.

🤣 This was a question I knew very well.

Back in the day my Warcraft, Dota, Red Alert, and Counter-Strike skills were legendary in my grade. When I played, it was basically “if Buddha blocks me, I slay Buddha; if gods block me, I slay gods.” Sometimes I was so ruthless I even wiped out my own teammates.

So I told them directly:

There’s nothing wrong with playing games (other than being bad for your eyes).

I’m actually someone who benefited from gaming.

Games taught me many things that textbooks never did.

For example:

• My earliest exposure to game theory came from games.

• I even studied Heavenly Stems, Earthly Branches, Yin-Yang, and the Eight Trigrams just to understand certain game mechanics.

• I learned about historical landmarks, traditional Chinese medicine points, tactics and battles, historical stories, and even random survival skills.

I also made many good friends.

Other than costing some pocket money and sitting too long, it was basically all upside.

But how does this relate to addiction?

The Real Reason for Addiction

Addiction happens because you’ve never tasted something truly good.

You’ve never played high-quality games. Your taste buds haven’t been developed.

There’s a Chinese saying:
“Once you’ve tasted luxury, it’s hard to return to simplicity.”

If someone feeds you fine cuisine for years and then suddenly gives you coarse grain, your body will instinctively reject it.

The same applies to games.

The best thing you can do is introduce kids to the true masterpieces—games that represent the pinnacle of human creativity, where code and art were refined to the deepest level.

Let them experience:

• the compassion within grand narratives

• the inevitability within elegant logic

• the full range of human emotions

• the calculations hidden behind human brilliance

Once someone has seen real mountains and real blue skies, once they’ve felt genuine brotherhood in battle, those plastic, number-driven mobile games filled with red notification dots will never satisfy them again.

Why This Actually Solves Addiction

You might ask:
“But that still doesn’t solve the addiction problem.”

Here’s the reality:

Across decades of gaming history, true masterpieces are actually very few—especially ones that match your personal taste.

There simply aren’t enough to be addicted to.

And once you start consuming the best works, you develop standards:

• you want ritual and immersion

• you pursue perfection

• you start studying background lore

• you practice skills

• you think more deeply

This is a brutal transformation:

Once you’ve experienced the best, you can’t go back.

Your senses grow a protective layer called taste.

Only then do you realize:

Most things in the world are mediocre.

Instead of restricting or controlling people, the real solution is simple:

Make them picky.

Once someone becomes picky, they no longer need to resist temptation.
They simply follow their aesthetic instinct.

Follow your taste.

This principle also applies to crypto trading:

• Once you’ve seen truly interesting, culturally rich memes, other memes feel empty.

• Once you’ve seen $1,000 Bitcoin, everything else feels trivial.

Taste in the Age of AI

In the summer of 2026, with AI algorithms roaring everywhere, this “pickiness” becomes the very thing that distinguishes humans from AI.

We live in a world of endless information abundance.

Schopenhauer once said that life swings like a pendulum between pain and boredom.

Algorithms have become the cheapest weapon against boredom.

They precisely calculate your emptiness and feed you endless bite-sized content that can be consumed in 0.1 seconds.

Like feeding crumbs to chicks who have never seen the world.

Our attention becomes a fragile currency, consumed endlessly through scrolling, until we fall into the black hole of attention fatigue.

The more information we receive, the hungrier our souls become, because we are losing the ability to gaze deeply and think for long periods of time.

What Is Taste?

In simple terms:

Taste is intuition.

You may not be able to explain exactly why something is good, but you instantly know it cannot be replaced.

In crypto, taste allows you to immediately distinguish:

• narratives built purely on hype

• structures that are actually sound

• temporary price drops

• genuine “iPhone moments”

• or “Nokia moments”

Others might need long research to realize something is low quality.

But you can see it in a single glance.

Why?

Because you’ve already encountered so many similar things before.

Your previous logic, calculations, and reasoning have transformed into intuition.

Readers of “Thinking, Fast and Slow” would call this System 1 thinking.

Taste Is Not Style

Taste is not style.

It is not preference.

It is a long-trained intuitive judgment ability.

It comes from:

• what you have read

• what you have analyzed

• what you have experienced

It comes from understanding:

“Why should this thing exist in the first place?”

In the AI era, taste becomes a tool for attention management.

It is a cold ruler that instinctively tells you:

• which shiny things are merely algorithmic waste

• and which obscure works are actually masterpieces

The Danger of AI Convenience

Today we are overly obsessed with conclusions and analogies.

We imitate AI’s style of:

“Not this… but that…”

And in doing so, we miss countless insights and poetic moments.

AI is becoming the navigation system of this era.

Press a button and everything appears:

• the path

• the time

• the destination

Images are generated instantly.
Logic may be fabricated.
Conclusions are improvised.

Yet humans accept them without question.

When you order food delivery, you check the reviews.

But when AI gives you answers, you say nothing.

Did you suddenly become enlightened?
Or have you been domesticated by AI?

If you accept AI’s conclusions without understanding the reasoning behind them, then—according to a friend of mine who runs a restaurant—you are basically just a food runner.

A very junior one.

In a palace drama like Empresses in the Palace, you’d probably survive three minutes.

Becoming the Master of AI

Only when we go against the current—

• studying reasoning processes

• dissecting formulas

• deeply examining algorithmic logic

—do we train ourselves to become masters of AI, rather than drowning in its whirlpool.

Beauty is never just surface appearance.

It is the sense of order hidden deep inside logic
(like the 0.618 golden ratio).

Improving intellectual taste means rejecting a low-resolution life.

If you constantly consume AI-generated summaries and conclusions, your cognitive taste buds will slowly degrade.

Just like surviving on tasteless meal replacements, you eventually forget the flavor of a perfectly cooked wok-fried rice noodle.

Eventually, you lose the ability to appreciate real food.

Why You Must Study the Hard Stuff

You must read:

• hardcore academic papers

• old, yellowed books

• painfully difficult formulas and algorithms

Because classics contain extremely high information density.

They include not only structured reasoning, but also the author’s struggle at the edge of truth.

Once you get used to searching for that weightless feeling within fundamental logic, you will construct a panoramic map in your mind.

Others see trees.

You see mountains.

Someone who only reads conclusions is like a driver relying entirely on GPS.

Once the signal disappears, they cannot even find the road home.

The Beauty of Slowness

In this battle between technology and humanity:

Speed is the instinct of machines.

But the beauty of humanity lies in slowness—

• elegance

• emotional depth

• time-accumulated wisdom

• imperfect yet meaningful logic

When technology becomes cheap, taste becomes the only thing that defines you.

You must learn to appreciate the vitality when code and art merge, and feel the warmth of civilization behind great games and distinctive works.

Do not let your soul be worn down by mediocrity.

Do not only look at the destination.

Look at the mountains, mud, ravines, and cliffs along the way.

Because in an age where everything can be generated instantly, the only territory humans still possess is the ability to see through mediocrity and perceive essence at a glance.

Postscript

Some friends recently noticed that I’ve been spending a lot of money “training” my robot, and they couldn’t stand watching me struggle anymore.

So over the weekend they built a lazy version of the Clawbot Telegram bot:

👉 https://t.me/AnyaEasyBot

It’s basically a beginner-friendly environment setup where you can configure everything with just a few clicks, and the models are already optimized.

I’ll randomly pick two people who repost and comment on this article to receive experience invitation codes.

Source: https://x.com/agintender