Why friction is necessary for growth
jameelur.com
jameelur.com
If you're riding a bike up a hill, you can't go up without effort. But not all of your effort is actually moving you up the hill -- some of it is being lost in friction: inefficiencies in your muscles, friction in your gears and wheel and chain, wind resistance.
Similarly, you can't learn anything without effort; but it's often the case that effort you put in ends up wasted: if you're learning a language, time spent looking for content rather than studying content is friction; effort spent forcing yourself to read something that's too hard is effort you could have spent more profitably elsewhere.
Put that way, we should minimize friction, so that we can maximize the amount our effort goes towards actually growing.
It reminds me a bit of looking up coding solutions on StackOverflow back in the day. Yes, it was a slog and consumed valuable time. However, I always felt that I picked up all sorts of other valuable information reading a variety of possible solutions or spying a related but different problem and taking a moment to consider it.
It is similar to how I learned to play guitar. With no videos and very limited tablature, I had to learn songs by ear which was crazy inefficient. However, it trained my ear and kept me exploring the entire fretboard as I figured the song out. This ended up making me a much more complete guitarist.
The trouble with the "learn just this one thing" approach is that one is forced to learn said thing at the most basic level because anything beyond that requires all sorts of skills and techniques that are difficult to teach in lesson format. Rather, they're just absorbed as one explores the topic. It's the sort of subconscious / muscle memory stuff a person doesn't even realize they're learning.
So, yes, for the most basic of topics, I can see how removing the effort can make sense. For anything beyond that I feel there is tremendous value in the struggle.
Right now you could open a random Wikipedia article, study it and click random again, clearly there’s better options. SO wasn’t quite that bad as it was more constrained, but you still didn’t do it without external pressure to find something.
I’m told some use AI to do boilerplate work, but I bet those that buy wholesale into the AI hype use it for everything, especially things they don’t know much about and would actually benefit from learning themselves.
I am self-taught and naturally curious: having a machine to rob me of the chance to learn and discover, to beat my head against a wall, which I also have to babysit because it is dumb as a rock, is simply a net negative for me.
For example, I'm thinking of trying to drive a car uphill on ice and the way to do it is to add more friction by making the tires more grippy.
Now, maybe where the friction is matters. If it's between the tire and road, perhaps it reduces effort, but if in the engine pistons, maybe it increases effort.
Actually makes me think about how too little friction or too much friction can cause problems, just like too little stability or too much stability, or too little mobility or too much mobility can cause problems in our joints.
the "grippy" friction is closer in spirit to the concept of leverage: if I want to push something and get it moving, I need to brace my feet on the ground, otherwise when pushing the thing, I'm moving myself backwards and not making any progress.
While static and kinetic friction use the same word, they are actually quite different in spirit.
But I think at a more personal level truly learning and having that learning last happened because friction not because it was effortless. I honestly don't remember much about things that were effortless. Things that don't take effort can't show you what your doing wrong because it was effortless, there was no resistence to feel where you might be going wrong. I agree there is a optimal point of friction but minimization might not be that optimal point.
in our research, we found that an AI agent which involves the user in each step of the process (e.g. asking them to check the AI’s assumptions, or edit them directly if they’re not good) ends up being a bit slower -- i.e. more friction -- but gives the user more control. And when compared with an AI agent that provides less control but faster, users preferred the slower agent which provided more agency.
All analogies are wrong, but some are useful.
In the early 2000s I worked moving furniture for a few years and one of the guys had a saying "you build up your muscles, you tear down your joints" which I found to be true. Stimulus builds strength, but overuse builds weakness.
Sadly in today's world, we have people in positions of wealth and power who perceive work as easy. Meanwhile people who are actually doing the work that affluent people view as beneath them, are slowly declining.
AKA the glorification of work, working class hero mentality, etc, that seduce people into a life of servitude.
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IMHO this is causing the class division that's destroying the middle class. Soon there will only be lords who disdain work while touting its virtues, and serfs who are forced to work and be talked at under neofeudalism.
This is why I feel that the wrong people are in power, and have always been in power. The tension is about to reach a breaking point in the 2026 US election. We have the rise of AI and likely AGI in 10 years or less, coinciding with the rise of global authoritarianism, austerity and the shredding of social safety nets. Things could get ugly at a level we haven't witnessed since WWII.
What nobody seems to realize is that AI will level everything. Talent. Experience. Wealth. Class will become situational, performative. Based on luck even more than it is now. Maybe looking something like The Hunger Games.
I would propose that knowing this, we start taking action now to avoid the eventualities of the current timeline. For example, we could form a co-equal branch of government composed of people drawn by lottery (to offset the arbitrary concentration of influence) otherwise known as sortition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
I first mentioned it a month ago but it bears repeating. Although it's unlikely that anything like this will happen at a national level in any country.
Short of that, we should consider workplace equality. Where every employee has a vote, just like shareholders. Corporate charters should have the board defer to employees in the case of a tie. Another way to do it is to have the board be 50% labor, like in Germany for companies over 2,000 employees.
TL;DR: if we want to maximize leverage while reducing friction so that everyone has the opportunity to self-actualize, then we should be wary of moral imperatives handed down from the upper class and internalized by the working class.
There's some kind of logical flaw in all of this where "growth" is circularly defined as the overcoming of friction.
In a world where one could snap their fingers and magically have everything, would "growth" be impossible?
Conversely, just throw out all your technology and live in the woods and re-implement and re-discover agrarian tools and techniques: amazing growth!
The point is that in my opinion "growth" defined in this way is not a helpful goal.
Building/creating/producing something that is more cheap/efficient/better than an existing tech should be the goal, regardless of whether or not there is friction involved in creating it.
Friction in current technology may or may not be a signal that therein lies opportunity. It's not a given.
Think this one through. Would growth even make sense ? What would be the meaning of getting everything you want ? Would such a life be worth it ?
If you ask me, I'd say that such a life would have no meaning for anyone involved and as such, maybe the universe would not even care to have that experience. I don't know, just spitballing there !
Honestly I think it would be impossible, or at the very least incredibly unlikely. It would be something only the most exceptional people could possibly achieve
It probably shouldn't be that way
"bone in a healthy animal will adapt to the loads under which it is placed.If loading on a particular bone increases, the bone will remodel itself over time to become stronger to resist that sort of loading. [...] The inverse is true as well: if the loading on a bone decreases, the bone will become less dense and weaker due to the lack of the stimulus required for continued remodeling."
HN'er on Tuesday: Ow all my cartilage and tendons are damaged. Help!
Hebbian theory is a neuropsychological concept that explains how synaptic connections between neurons strengthen when they are activated simultaneously, often summarized as "cells that fire together, wire together." This theory, introduced by Donald Hebb in 1949, helps to understand learning and memory by illustrating how repeated experiences can enhance neural pathways.
Well, LLM's are probably here to stay. I'm not sure that OpenAI has found a viable business model, and as Matt Levine of Bloomberg put it recently, OpenAI is a "money furnace", that takes stupifying amounts of VC money (and, more importantly, cloud compute capacity) and burns it for purposes that do not remotely pay for the cost.
The biggest reason not to rely on ChatGPT specifically, is that it is likely to either disappear or else become much, much more expensive in the future. But, if you can use DeepSeek or some other much, much cheaper alternative just as well, I suppose that will do.
I'm aware of other applications of AI and LLMs, but what most of the people see are the consumer facing ones like ChatGPT/Gemini/etc.
The behavior I need is typical “honest broker” behavior. These folks have been around for centuries. It’s a totally valid (and valuable) service.
If I can present a specific workflow and requirements description to ChatGPT, and it responds with paid recommendations that actually match my needs, I don’t really mind. I would still like to know about alternatives, but I will still have something that will fit the bill.
As noted on the thread, a good ML model can do better, with less. I can use that kind of recommendation system for discovering my alternatives for a given item/tech/whatever, on demand.
But current crop of LLMs, with a strong leaning for embedding seamless ads into prompt responses, a double no. No, because I don't agree on how training data is stol ^H^H^H^H collected from wider internet and everything, another no for unsolicited ads.
I'll continue using Kagi and being a luddite, thanks.
[0]: https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-large-lang...
If LLMs can become true brokers, that would be great, but the pressure to corrupt would be tremendous.
Not sure if we’ll ever get there, though. I have hope. The broker model is centuries old. It’s really a solved problem. The issue is that the current generation is notoriously bad at learning from history.
> The issue is that the current generation is notoriously bad at learning from history.
On top of that, the same people think they can just move to another planet and survive by eating money there.
Right now, LLMs are selling a vision of “friction-free” productivity, but we haven’t yet gotten to the part, where humans start mastering LLMs as tools. That’s still quite nascent.
Once that happens, a lot of people that have been firing all their employees, and getting fat on the profits, are going be finding themselves on fire.
Your prompts will be your moat and your margins will go to infinity. It will be glorious and sustainable for years to come.
- A large fraction of soon-to-be-redundant upper management, 2025.
Unlike the disgusting parasites called "employees" or "the workforce" (vomit)
The Glorious management and executives are at such levels that those vomit-inducing vermin could never reach. They will never be replaced.
They are by definition invincible, irreplaceable by AI, or even future Superintelligence.
Because by definition, they ARE the Superintelligence.
Personally I don't think LLMs as tools are "masterable" any more than I think slot machines have an element of skill to win
Tools are only as powerful as their operators; and to be a powerful operator, you must face friction, the often the better.
Is Object Orientation bad? Is AI driven development bad? Not intrinsically, but anytime people are drawn to convenience, there are hidden tradeoffs they're making.
As far as programming goes, I tend to think that the friction created by bad OO practices haven't really led to anything other than "creative" coping mechanisms in those codebases, so perhaps for this analogy, that doesn't really bode well. But anyway...
I feel very annoyed by pointless friction (inefficient systems) but motivated by friction that improves myself (going to the gym)
If you solve for what’s best for you this trumps seeking friction
"Humans are creatures of comfort. Just like so many things in this world, we follow the path of least resistance. With access to technology being ubiquitous, and ChatGPT being so widely available, to choose not to use it is very hard. You need to deliberately prioritize your growth and choose to go against the current. You need to deliberately introduce friction to the process."
Willpower to me seems more like a limited resource that should be invested (and is I agree trainable to a degree) wisely to maximize growth
One anecdote of this: in consulting, half of my brain power used to be spent on taking copious notes and organizing action items. Now tools like Granola have trivialized that process so i can focus on understanding
Human learning follows the same logic. Struggle, what educators call “desirable difficulty”, is the stimulus for neuro synaptic remodeling, deeper encoding, and ultimately the capture of knowledge . On the other hand, effortless consumption rarely rewires anything - you just run an existing circuit . The trick lies in the magnitude, you want eustress, not overwhelm. It’s like the Goldilocks portion of resistance that keeps feedback and growth flowing and motivation intact. When we remove all frictions, our minds, just like our muscles will decondition. That’s where we need to incorporate purposeful frictions like you said, in order to strengthen. We are literally coded by our DNA for calibrated struggle. Without it, biological systems will drift toward atrophy and with it, they will evolve.
“The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most pervasive of all fallacies in philosophy. So common is it that one questions whether it might not be called the philosophical fallacy. It consists in the supposition that whatever is found true under certain conditions may forthwith be asserted universally or without limits and conditions. Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned. Because the success of any particular struggle is measured by reaching a point of frictionless action, therefore there is such a thing as an all-inclusive end of effortless smooth activity endlessly maintained.
It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfillment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they arc, or when taken universally.”
If we look at it rationally, the phone numbers were an extra complexity layer introduced by technology. The smartphones solved that problem rightly so. You just have to member the person's name, rightly so.
I don't think that's any more rational than suggesting smartphones supplanted memory training; the phone number is an implementation detail, the lack of practicing memorization of important information is a general case. Smartphones created a dependency on themselves and solved problems that mostly weren't problems, or were often tertiary optimization problems before they came along, while phone technology actually solved a fundamental problem with high-latency communication via mail.
If I ask myself whether I'm generally better off having my contact numbers in my smartphone vs before—which itself is a fictitious premise, since mobile phones had them before they got smart—the answer is definitely "no", because the distribution of people I call isn't so varied as to make memorizing them difficult, but my lack of inclination to do even that means I don't remember the most common case and always need to have the phone or I'm screwed.
It's hilarious to watch this play out with drivers who are entirely dependent on a Maps app for directions in their own city. They don't remember basic routes, address blocks, can't even do it sometimes without the phone speaking it to them. It wasn't really a problem before, you'd just figure it out most of the time, or ask someone for an approximation.
The author says they still remember these numbers. Maybe they remember fewer and this is shrinking? Seems like a poor example at any rate.
We're headed for near-infinite bad entertainment. Pretty soon, we're going to have fan fiction converted to movies by AI. It will be as bad as text fan fiction. We're only a few years from "Make me a sequel to ..."
Think in the children of the future, growing with a much more advanced and ubiquitous technology, and the mental models they will have. Who knows what will happen, but seeing how slow education and regulations adapt and how fast big companies and consumerism grow and move, I'm not very optimistic.
That's not to say that this notion I raise should not be also considered with others. We are indeed offloading some brain processing to a machine... what have we lost?
What will we gain?
With AI, you can still have plenty of friction. For me, I aim higher and my friction is moved elsewhere. AI is good at very many things, but there are plenty of things it is not good at.
Tech companies want us to be dependent on their information lookup services, while simultaneously not making those services dependable and predictable long-term.
Such a bold and non obvious statement that the author backs up with memorizing phone numbers as a youth?
Let me fix that:
> It is likely also going to be the biggest GENERATOR of creativity in my generation.
Reason: I am creative and I use it for creative things. And I no longer have to spend my memory holding phone numbers in my head.
This resonates! Doing things the long, hard, stupid way is the extreme version/application of this opinion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41512207
Also, since convenience/comfort are so widely available now, you practically need to choose discomfort in order to grow: https://herbertlui.net/personal-growth-happens-after-volunta...
Contemporary novels, especially those depicting modern times, are mostly terrible. I recently read a review of one such modern novel in the Financial Times—-the review was very promising—-and decided to buy and read it. Meanwhile, I am listening to audiobooks of classic, mostly forgotten novels from the last 100 years in my native language. What a difference! One could say that there is a selection effect at work, and that would be fair, but the prose, ideas, and creativity are of such superior quality in those classics compared to modern novels that I wonder how and why people read them. Some of the classics are certainly dated, but you can still understand their purpose, their vision.
I see the same phenomenon in music and movies, most of which are pseudo-creative works designed to make money in the short term. Movies and music that is quickly forgotten, shared on social media for a couple of weeks and then gone, forever. Although it may be natural to say “kids these days,” I have the impression that the easiest fruits to pick in terms of creativity have been picked in the last 100-150 years, during which more people have participated in creative fields, and in the end, there is not much else to say or experiment with. I mean, one of the most popular film genres today is the biopic, which often features people who are still alive or have recently passed away. In these films, screenwriters and directors sometimes feel the need to tweak certain facts and timelines to make the whole endeavor a little more creative.
I recently commented on a video in which one of today's most popular singers did not sing during their concert, but simply danced (badly, half-naked) with playback doing 90% of the work. Some were surprised by my astonishment, saying that this is how concerts by these new artists are today. That's the vicious circle: people don't even expect singers to sing anymore.
Technology, on the other hand, continues, at least for now, to push the boundaries.
In the moment, you can be easily mistaken that something is good, or the best even if the marketing team of that something is really going hard at your wallet. But the only way, and they know it too well, to assess quality is to simply...wait and see later.
If you need a proof, here's one : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookshop_Memories The "it was better before" is not a recent phenomenon, I think.
Some decades in the past were not particularly good in terms of literary output (I am very familiar with literature in my native language and know much more than average in two or three other languages), but the last decade has been incredibly poor. And I suspect that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find original ideas. As time goes by, the average technical competence of artists almost inevitably increases, but the same cannot necessarily be said for creativity, for example.
I was imprecise when using the term "creativity"--what I wanted to say is that the human experience is varied but not infinite. How many more Mission Impossible, special agent, whatever, can be perceived as "original"? The interesting part of the James Bond movie is who is the next Bond, the costume, maybe the Bond-girl or the location, but the plot is of very little interest; it is all already watched.
I have seen 2,000 kidnappings in movies, one million people dying in all sorts of ways (and never seen a shooting irl), I don't know how many affairs, failed marriages, aliens coming and going I have watched; it becomes increasingly difficult over time to propose plots and ways of narrating that don't evoke a "already seen" feeling.
After the peplum films of the 1950s, there was a hiatus in terms of ancient Rome settings. Then came Gladiator, Rome, and Spartacus, which were exciting. Now, when you watch Gladiator 2, it feels like you've seen it before, at least to me. Maybe if they stopped making these films for a couple of decades, they would become novel again.
Go sit through a dozen escape artist podcast episodes, and find a top metal band in whatever subgenre you’re complaining about.
(Eg: swing/disco -> Diablo Swing Orchestra, classical/electronic -> igorrr, folk -> finntroll/faun, pop->poppy’s “I disagree”, musicals -> amaranthe, rock -> sumo cyco, variety -> babymetal, middle eastern -> bloodywood, etc.)
Of course, you may like whatever you want, but if you compare Pink Floyd and Zeppelin to the current landscape, I don't think we find an equivalent quality and vision today. And not because current musicians (outside the playback- and autotune-heavy artists of today) are bad, but because of the hanging fruit I was referring to.
Movies today? Books? I am not finding great quality, but it is possible that, compared to others, I have a more refined palate.
Steve Jobs on Crafting Idea to Product
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SQYGSFrJY
Tumbling rocks make them shiny metaphor
I see it like this: if you weren’t going to be creative in the first place and you’re just grasping for slop to check a box then there’s no loss, perhaps even a slight gain of creativity, if you are fully engaged in being creative you can now prototype things and preview them and spin off ideas that compound and refine and inspire new ones so much faster so the overall creative output is accelerated both “horizontally and vertically” to borrow from compute scaling imagery