I skimmed through the paper and skipped the article (paywalled) and I am absolutely no expert in the field. I've found the premises of the paper very interesti

I skimmed through the paper and skipped the article (paywalled) and I am absolutely no expert in the field. I've found the premises of the paper very interesting and I think the so called effort paradox can be also framed in reverse: we make the effort when we think it will be rewarding hence we then appreciate what we obtained more. One personal example for me is solving programming problems: I sit down for hours to solve them because solving the problem is my goal and looking up the solution in some LLM chat bot would not give me the same feeling but for someone whose goal is using the solution for their goals, relying on an LLM is avoiding a cost to focus their energies on what's really important to them. I don't know if people really are lazy, I think most of them are smart enough to think through what to invest on and what not. As someone else also said consistency is key, whatever it's easy for us today has been difficult at the beginning, the reward might come years later we started the journey.