Author: danny; Source: X, @agintender

On days when markets are plunging, three of the cheapest things are: predictions, sentiment, and certainty. When everyone is asking the same question: "Is it the bottom now?" then it is obviously not the bottom. There is nothing new in front of the AI ​​prompt. Any "difficulty buying method" that can be formalized, scaled, and learned by AI will fail the moment it is asked by a human.

In the AI era, the most important human ability is not to create or predict trends, but to appreciate aesthetics.

At a New Year's family gathering, the elders of several families gathered together to complain about the fact that their children were addicted to games and were affecting their studies.

I sat aside and thought to myself: Does it sound like your grades will be better if you don’t play games? !

I don’t know why the situation changed. They remembered that I seemed to be an Internet addict when I was a child, so they asked me what should I do?

I am very familiar with this question. When I was playing World of Warcraft, Dota, Red Alert, CS... they were all unique in my grade. If a Buddha blocked a God, he would kill a God, and if a God blocked a Buddha, he would kill a Buddha. He was so ruthless that he could even beat his own people.

I will make my point clear and clear—— There’s nothing wrong with playing games (except it’s not good for my eyes). I’m the beneficiary of playing games. I learned a lot of things that I couldn’t learn in textbooks at the time because of playing games (that’s where I first came into contact with game theory; can you believe I learned the Heavenly Stems, Earthly Branches, Yin and Yang Bagua just to play games?), historical sites, traditional Chinese medicine acupuncture points, tactical battles, historical allusions, learned a bunch of wild survival skills, and made many good friends. For me, apart from spending a bit of money and pocket money, it is a huge benefit with no harm.

Having said so much, what does this have to do with addiction, or preventing addiction?

The reason for addiction is because you have never had good food - You have not played high-quality games. Your taste buds are untapped.

It is difficult to transition from extravagance to frugality. When you eat fine grains for a long time, and then let you eat coarse grains, you will be physiologically nauseated, and you will instinctively resist, let alone addiction.

So the best thing to do is to take him to experience those classic "masterpieces" that took countless geniuses to polish the code and art to the depths of their souls, so that he can feel the compassion in the grand narrative and the inevitability of the exquisite logic. Let him appreciate the joys and sorrows of human emotions and the calculations hidden in the light of human nature. Once he has seen the real mountains, the real blue sky, and the real brotherhood of carrying a gun, those "industrial garbage" driven by numerical values, induced by red dots, and full of plastic on the screen will no longer be able to catch his eye.

At this point you may ask, then this doesn’t solve the problem of addiction? You have to know that over the decades since the game world has developed, there are actually only a few classic masterpieces, and even fewer that suit your taste. These numbers are not enough for you to get addicted. In addition, when you start to eat something good, you will start to have requirements, need to have a sense of ritual, pursue perfection - you need to know a lot of background knowledge and practice, need to think, etc.

This is an extremely cruel experience of "going from luxury to frugality" and "CEO re-experiences starting from scratch". When you have eaten good food, your senses will develop a layer of cuticle called "taste", and you will know that everything is of inferior quality.

Instead of prohibiting, restricting, or guiding, you only need to make a person become a "picky eater". From now on, you don’t need to restrain yourself or spend any energy to resist temptation. You only need to follow your inner aesthetic. Follow your taste. (This is also very similar to currency speculation. When you have seen an interesting and well-founded meme, everything else is just a passing cloud; when you have seen 1,000 BTC, everything else is just a passing cloud.)

This kind of picky eating, in the summer of 2026, when AI algorithms are roaring, has become the possibility for humans to distinguish themselves from AI, or to surpass AI.

We are in a precisely cut, never-ending, bustling world of information explosion. Schopenhauer once said that life is like a pendulum, swinging back and forth between pain and boredom, and algorithms have become the cheapest dopamine for us to fight boredom. It accurately calculates your emptiness at this moment, and then feeds it a pile of average-scoring crumbs that can be digested in just 0.1 seconds, just like feeding a chick that has never seen the world. As a result, our attention has become an easily depleted currency, falling into a black hole called "attention fatigue" in its never-ending slide. The more information there is, the hungrier the soul is, because we are losing the ability to "look for a long time + think".

When we complain about the dominance of electronic waste, have we asked ourselves whether we are handing over the process of thinking to others? Convenience and efficiency are not reasons for human beings to become wiser.

What is aesthetics? To put it bluntly, it is a kind of intuition. When you first look at it or smell it, you may not be able to tell what is good about it, but you just know the physical feeling that no one can replace.

In the currency circle, can you tell at a glance: which ones are illusions piled up by narrative, which ones are still structurally valid; which ones are just price drops; which ones are iPhone moments; which ones are Nokia moments.

Others may need to do some research to discover that it is low, but you can tell at a glance that this thing is low. There is no other reason, because you have seen too many or experienced too many similar things before, and the previous algorithms, logical thinking, calculations and deductions have become your intuition. Friends who have read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" may say that this is System 1 in the book

Aesthetics is not style or taste, but an intuitive judgment that has been trained for a long time. It comes from what you have read, what you have dismantled, what you have experienced, and whether you understand "why it should exist."

Human aesthetics in the AI ​​era is no longer a certain life interest and preference orientation, but an "intuitive" attention management tool based on past accumulation - it is a cold ruler and an intuition for beauty. It can subconsciously tell you which things are eye-catching but are just the excrement of algorithms, and which things are obscure but are masterpieces.

Nowadays, we are too accustomed to conclusions and analogies, and we all learn from AI's "not... but...", but we don't know how much we have missed out on the romance and insights.

AI has gradually become the navigation of this era. With just a click of a button, the path, time taken and end point are all clearly visible. Paintings are instantaneous, logic is made up randomly, and conclusions are improvised - and human beings take all the photos. When you order takeout, you will read the comments below. How come you don’t say a word when you come to AI? Have you arrived in Sichuan? Or has it been domesticated by AI?

If we fully accept the conclusion of the AI output without thinking about the causal relationship behind it, according to the description given to me by my friend who runs a restaurant at home: you are at most a waiter, still the most elementary kind, who can only run exhausted between countless rooms. In The Legend of Zhen Huan, you can only survive for 3 minutes at most.

Only when we go against the current, study the process of deduction, dismantle the skeleton of the formula, and deeply contemplate the logic of the algorithm, can we train ourselves to be the masters of AI and stop ourselves from being indulged in the whirlpool of various AIs.

Beauty is never the visual layer, it is the sense of order deep in logic. (Refer to 0.618 golden ratio)

To improve this "aesthetics of knowledge" is essentially to reject a "low-resolution" life. If you consume summaries or conclusions generated by AI for a long time, your thinking taste buds will gradually deteriorate and you will become unable to understand the complex reality. It's like eating tasteless meal replacements for a long time, and you will eventually forget the flavor of fried beef, and eventually you will lose your ability to appreciate delicious food.

You must read those hard-core classic papers, open those yellowed books, and reproduce those boring formulas and algorithms. Because the information density of classics is extremely high, it not only contains systematic arguments, but also the author's struggle and reflection on the edge of truth. When you get used to looking for the feeling of weightlessness in the underlying logic of the algorithm, you will build a panoramic map in your brain. People see trees, but you see mountains. People who only look at conclusions are like drivers who rely on navigation. Once the Internet is disconnected, they can't even find their way home.

In this game between technology and human nature, speed is the instinct of the machine, and the "slowness" that is elegant, full of time sedimentation, full of emotions, occasionally logical, and has the charm of vicissitudes of life can reflect the beauty of human nature (aka taste). When technology becomes cheap, your taste becomes the only criterion that defines you. You have to feel the vitality of the cross-border integration of code and art, and enjoy the warmth of civilization behind those epoch-making games and distinctive works.

Don’t let your soul wear out in the average. Don’t just look at the end point, look at the mountains, rivers, muddy ravines, steep slopes and majestic slopes along the way. Because in this era where everything can be generated, only the aesthetic intuition that can see through the mediocre and get to the essence at a glance is the last and insurmountable territory for us as human beings.