5 ms·

Why friction is necessary for growth

158 points by WanderingSoul 1y ago

rgtht 1y ago
[flagged]
rgtht 1y ago
[flagged]
the_snooze 1y ago
>The ease of access to information has geared us towards efficiently looking up information instead of remembering it. Tech companies want us to be dependent on their information lookup services, while simultaneously not making those services dependable and predictable long-term.
d-us-vb 1y ago
I'm not sure that AI will always be "convenient". We're currently in the rose-colored glasses phase, a lot like object-orientation was back in the '90s. It'll probably never go away, but in a few years everyone will realize that it creates its own friction, just like poorly designed OO codebases have. Inevitably, there will be an entire supporting industry designed to circumvent the inherent problems like a tradeoff. 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...
rictus 1y ago
I'm not coonvinced by the conclusion. The contacts example doesn't show friction leads to growth, it shows absence of friction leads to degrowth. The other way around isn't necessarily true.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  Necessary but not sufficient, maybe.
- deanputney 1y ago
  I'd argue it doesn't show growth or shrinking. What capacity does remembering strings of numbers "grow"? There's no clear connection to remembering other things, or math skills, or anything but how many numbers you remember. The author says they still remember these numbers. Maybe they remember fewer and this is shrinking? Seems like a poor example at any rate.
mrbluecoat 1y ago
A related read: 'The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph' by Ryan Holiday
rossdavidh 1y ago
"ChatGPT is here to stay..." 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.
- ip26 1y ago
  Its "product recommendation" capabilities are growing quickly, which is directly convertible to ad revenue, and we know ad revenue sustained Google for two decades.
  - malfist 1y ago
    ML can do just as good if not better job of product recommendations without the risk of hallucinations and is cheaper to boot.
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    It'd be very fun and ironic if all this research, turmoil and energy waste just boiled down to a "better ad machine". 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.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
      Well, what I don’t mind, are truly relevant ads. This is different from showing me (a man in my 60s) ED medicine ads, unsolicited, whenever I visit a news site. 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.
borroka 1y ago
It is even more worrying that what is defined here as "growth", and in other contexts can be interpreted as "quality", when absent or reduced, leads to a vicious cycle of ever-decreasing quality over time. 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.
- hedora 1y ago
  You’re probably just reading / listening to the wrong stuff. 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.)
luxuryballs 1y ago
in my limited experience using LLMs for side projects it has been a massive creativity cultivator rather than a creativity killer, to such an extent that I don’t understand this take, but perhaps my use case is more nuanced/limited than most? 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
cantor_S_drug 1y ago
I will leave this here. Steve Jobs on Crafting Idea to Product https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SQYGSFrJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SQYGSFrJY Tumbling rocks make them shiny metaphor https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OGQusNS1kcU https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OGQusNS1kcU
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I’ve always said that we need to get out of our comfort zone, to grow. I’ve never thought it necessary to expound; it’s such a “no-brainer.” 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.
- hedora 1y ago
  Nonsense. Just hire people to automate away 100% of tasks at your company. Later, lay them off and reduce your costs to a $100/month LLM subscription. 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.
  - r_lee 1y ago
    Nonsense. 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.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  > we haven’t yet gotten to the part, where humans start mastering LLMs as tools Personally I don't think LLMs as tools are "masterable" any more than I think slot machines have an element of skill to win
luc_ 1y ago
I think that there's something to be said about brain cycles being freed up for different things. We were relieved of some manual tasks during the industrial revolution. Now what else are our brains free to do? 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?
jwpapi 1y ago
I think it comes down to reasonable friction to overcome or pointless friction 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
- BinaryIgor 1y ago
  This section of the article sums it up pretty nicely: "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."
  - jwpapi 1y ago
    But I’m not agreeing with that statement. I don’t think its a good mental model. If you don’t have candies at home it will be easier to eat healthy. I don’t think deliberately having them at home will lead to more growth, it will just increase the likelihood of failure. 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
boilerupnc 1y ago
Related: Wolff's Law "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." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolff%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolff%27s_law
- flux3125 1y ago
  Same for muscles
  - dijit 1y ago
    Same for brains
    - sunlightteacher 1y ago
      Hebbian learning
      - chrisweekly 1y ago
        Yes! 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.
- jancsika 1y ago
  HN'er on Monday: I'll just do maximum friction to improve bones. No pain no gain, baby! HN'er on Tuesday: Ow all my cartilage and tendons are damaged. Help!
dchow1 1y ago
I think people made similar comments re: the advent of mobile and the internet. New technology always introduces new pitfalls. I agree that using AI as a substitute for deep thinking is an insidious problem (especially for young kids who are still learning how to think), but for those of us who use it as a thought partner - it can accelerate the tedious parts of gathering and sourcing inputs to focus on synthesizing. 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
spyckie2 1y ago
> It is likely also going to be the biggest killer of creativity in my generation. 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.
BinaryIgor 1y ago
And as an extension, people who can exist in both words - leveraging AI or any other new shiny tool that will come up, and at the same time - constantly pushing themselves mentally in an old-school way regularly, will be unstoppable. Tools are only as powerful as their operators; and to be a powerful operator, you must face friction, the often the better.
djoldman 1y ago
> Overcoming friction leads to growth. Comfort leads to stagnation.... I’ve come to believe that with the rise of convenience and comfort, it becomes harder for us to reach our potential.... A certain level of convenience can lead to efficiency gains. Automation is important for a reason. Too much convenience though, that's a killer. When friction was inherent in the system, applying ourselves led to growth as we overcame that friction. 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.
- boccaff 1y ago
  You could think about how most people can get away without doing anything physical to survive, so we must artificially exercise to be healthy. The question then is if this analogy hold for mental capacities, and I think it does.
- andoando 1y ago
  Thats not a logical flaw, that's throwing out the premise of living in a logical world and saying "but if things worked completely differently, your argument makes no sense"
  - djoldman 1y ago
    Yep, I agree. That analogy wasn't so helpful.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  > In a world where one could snap their fingers and magically have everything, would "growth" be impossible? 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
gwd 1y ago
Can I make a distinction between "friction" and "effort"? 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.
- holoduke 1y ago
  You have to leave the easy path to get to new destinations. That sometimes result in time spend without any result. Wasted? Maybe, but still required to travel further.
- miguelacevedo 1y ago
  Great distinction! Ideally, friction occurs at the edge of your ability instead of on tedious tasks where you learn nothing, and it's more like work.
  - majeedkazemi 1y ago
    yeah, friction should be designed to be meaningful and not just feel frustrating or like a barrier. it should empower the user. 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. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3654777.3676345 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3654777.3676345
- RyanOD 1y ago
  I never considered the type of effort you're referring to as wasted. 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.
deleted 1y ago
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busymom0 1y ago
In weightlifting, it's similar to progressive overload giving enough stimulus for the muscles to grow. If you just keep lifting the same weight over and over again, your muscles get used to it and no longer grow. However, if you slowly keep increasing the stimulus by either increasing weights, or increasing the reps/sets, or slowing the tempo, then it gives your muscles a reason to adapt and grow to be able to handle the new load.
BrenBarn 1y ago
The law of conservation of intelligence: smarter technology leads to dumber humans.
deleted 1y ago
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herbertl 1y ago
> You need to deliberately prioritize your growth and choose to go against the current. You need to deliberately introduce friction to the process. This resonates! Doing things the long, hard, stupid way is the extreme version/application of this opinion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41512207 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-voluntary-discomfort/ https://herbertlui.net/personal-growth-happens-after-volunta...
cheema33 1y ago
We should all be programming in assembly. Or better, 0s and 1s. We are missing out on great friction and growth by programming in higher level languages. 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.
Animats 1y ago
"ChatGPT and by extension “AI” is likely the biggest “revolution” of my generation. It is likely also going to be the biggest killer of creativity in my generation. I always thought the creativity killer was going to be access to infinite entertainment. I think I was wrong." 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 ..."
- dzink 1y ago
  Maybe by then people will figure out entertainment is mostly a waste of time and ditch the pursuit of it. Hopefully for something more purpose-driven.
  - Animats 1y ago
    Could be the demise of a common popular culture. Everyone will have their own private bubble.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - 64718283661 1y ago
    Entertainment is only a waste of time if you do it alone
hoss1474489 1y ago
Effort is the algorithm. (Presentation on learning in the age of AI by the Veritasium guy) https://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70 https://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70
dzink 1y ago
Reading only the title, I thought this was going to be about how little startups can only grow if the are solving some real friction for users, instead of something that can be solved by a user with just a couple of extra queries to ChatGPT. If remembering your company’s niche when it’s needed and finding the credentials to log in is more effort than solving the problem with newer LLM’s, the growth may not be exponential. But then the content turned to be about personal growth.
kiriberty 1y ago
"When I was a child in Sri Lanka, I ended up memorizing the landline numbers of all my close relatives. To this day I remember them. The moment I got a phone where my contacts could be saved, I stopped remembering numbers." 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.
- brailsafe 1y ago
  > If we look at it rationally, the phone numbers were an extra complexity layer introduced by technology 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.
feiss 1y ago
Stop thinking in terms of current generations and today's LLMs. Your mind has matured in a pre-AI world (even pre-internet), and we are using LLMs with that background . 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.
qgin 1y ago
Your brain needs a loss function just as much as a model does.
hunkmuller0 1y ago
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catchcatchcatch 1y ago
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4Dimensionbeing 1y ago
Your idea of necessary friction is universal. Friction is not a bug in biology; it’s the feature that keeps systems alive and adaptive. Bones mineralize under load and thin without it; muscles hypertrophy with strain and atrophy in a cast; immune networks calibrate by meeting antigens, not by hiding from them. At the cellular level, survival isn’t guaranteed - deprived of trophic signals or mechanical challenge, many cells default to apoptosis, a programmed self-destruct that enforces “use it or lose it.” In other words, life is written to respond to calibrated challenge: too little challenge invites decay, the right dose drives renewal and growth. 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.
jfarmer 1y ago
From John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, the fallacy that "Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned." “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.”

158 points by WanderingSoul 1y ago

rgtht 1y ago

[flagged]

rgtht 1y ago

[flagged]

the_snooze 1y ago

>The ease of access to information has geared us towards efficiently looking up information instead of remembering it. Tech companies want us to be dependent on their information lookup services, while simultaneously not making those services dependable and predictable long-term.

d-us-vb 1y ago

I'm not sure that AI will always be "convenient". We're currently in the rose-colored glasses phase, a lot like object-orientation was back in the '90s. It'll probably never go away, but in a few years everyone will realize that it creates its own friction, just like poorly designed OO codebases have. Inevitably, there will be an entire supporting industry designed to circumvent the inherent problems like a tradeoff. 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...

rictus 1y ago

I'm not coonvinced by the conclusion. The contacts example doesn't show friction leads to growth, it shows absence of friction leads to degrowth. The other way around isn't necessarily true.

HPsquared 1y ago
Necessary but not sufficient, maybe.
deanputney 1y ago
I'd argue it doesn't show growth or shrinking. What capacity does remembering strings of numbers "grow"? There's no clear connection to remembering other things, or math skills, or anything but how many numbers you remember. The author says they still remember these numbers. Maybe they remember fewer and this is shrinking? Seems like a poor example at any rate.

mrbluecoat 1y ago

A related read: 'The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph' by Ryan Holiday

rossdavidh 1y ago

"ChatGPT is here to stay..." 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.

ip26 1y ago
Its "product recommendation" capabilities are growing quickly, which is directly convertible to ad revenue, and we know ad revenue sustained Google for two decades.
- malfist 1y ago
  ML can do just as good if not better job of product recommendations without the risk of hallucinations and is cheaper to boot.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  It'd be very fun and ironic if all this research, turmoil and energy waste just boiled down to a "better ad machine". 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.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    Well, what I don’t mind, are truly relevant ads. This is different from showing me (a man in my 60s) ED medicine ads, unsolicited, whenever I visit a news site. 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.

borroka 1y ago

It is even more worrying that what is defined here as "growth", and in other contexts can be interpreted as "quality", when absent or reduced, leads to a vicious cycle of ever-decreasing quality over time. 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.

hedora 1y ago
You’re probably just reading / listening to the wrong stuff. 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.)

luxuryballs 1y ago

in my limited experience using LLMs for side projects it has been a massive creativity cultivator rather than a creativity killer, to such an extent that I don’t understand this take, but perhaps my use case is more nuanced/limited than most? 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

cantor_S_drug 1y ago

I will leave this here. Steve Jobs on Crafting Idea to Product https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SQYGSFrJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SQYGSFrJY Tumbling rocks make them shiny metaphor https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OGQusNS1kcU https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OGQusNS1kcU

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

I’ve always said that we need to get out of our comfort zone, to grow. I’ve never thought it necessary to expound; it’s such a “no-brainer.” 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.

hedora 1y ago
Nonsense. Just hire people to automate away 100% of tasks at your company. Later, lay them off and reduce your costs to a $100/month LLM subscription. 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.
- r_lee 1y ago
  Nonsense. 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.
bluefirebrand 1y ago
> we haven’t yet gotten to the part, where humans start mastering LLMs as tools Personally I don't think LLMs as tools are "masterable" any more than I think slot machines have an element of skill to win

luc_ 1y ago

I think that there's something to be said about brain cycles being freed up for different things. We were relieved of some manual tasks during the industrial revolution. Now what else are our brains free to do? 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?

jwpapi 1y ago

I think it comes down to reasonable friction to overcome or pointless friction 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

BinaryIgor 1y ago
This section of the article sums it up pretty nicely: "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."
- jwpapi 1y ago
  But I’m not agreeing with that statement. I don’t think its a good mental model. If you don’t have candies at home it will be easier to eat healthy. I don’t think deliberately having them at home will lead to more growth, it will just increase the likelihood of failure. 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

boilerupnc 1y ago

Related: Wolff's Law "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." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolff%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolff%27s_law

flux3125 1y ago
Same for muscles
- dijit 1y ago
  Same for brains
  - sunlightteacher 1y ago
    Hebbian learning
    - chrisweekly 1y ago
      Yes! 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.
jancsika 1y ago
HN'er on Monday: I'll just do maximum friction to improve bones. No pain no gain, baby! HN'er on Tuesday: Ow all my cartilage and tendons are damaged. Help!

dchow1 1y ago

I think people made similar comments re: the advent of mobile and the internet. New technology always introduces new pitfalls. I agree that using AI as a substitute for deep thinking is an insidious problem (especially for young kids who are still learning how to think), but for those of us who use it as a thought partner - it can accelerate the tedious parts of gathering and sourcing inputs to focus on synthesizing. 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

spyckie2 1y ago

> It is likely also going to be the biggest killer of creativity in my generation. 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.

BinaryIgor 1y ago

And as an extension, people who can exist in both words - leveraging AI or any other new shiny tool that will come up, and at the same time - constantly pushing themselves mentally in an old-school way regularly, will be unstoppable. Tools are only as powerful as their operators; and to be a powerful operator, you must face friction, the often the better.

djoldman 1y ago

> Overcoming friction leads to growth. Comfort leads to stagnation.... I’ve come to believe that with the rise of convenience and comfort, it becomes harder for us to reach our potential.... A certain level of convenience can lead to efficiency gains. Automation is important for a reason. Too much convenience though, that's a killer. When friction was inherent in the system, applying ourselves led to growth as we overcame that friction. 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.

boccaff 1y ago
You could think about how most people can get away without doing anything physical to survive, so we must artificially exercise to be healthy. The question then is if this analogy hold for mental capacities, and I think it does.
andoando 1y ago
Thats not a logical flaw, that's throwing out the premise of living in a logical world and saying "but if things worked completely differently, your argument makes no sense"
- djoldman 1y ago
  Yep, I agree. That analogy wasn't so helpful.
bluefirebrand 1y ago
> In a world where one could snap their fingers and magically have everything, would "growth" be impossible? 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

gwd 1y ago

Can I make a distinction between "friction" and "effort"? 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.

holoduke 1y ago
You have to leave the easy path to get to new destinations. That sometimes result in time spend without any result. Wasted? Maybe, but still required to travel further.
miguelacevedo 1y ago
Great distinction! Ideally, friction occurs at the edge of your ability instead of on tedious tasks where you learn nothing, and it's more like work.
- majeedkazemi 1y ago
  yeah, friction should be designed to be meaningful and not just feel frustrating or like a barrier. it should empower the user. 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. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3654777.3676345 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3654777.3676345
RyanOD 1y ago
I never considered the type of effort you're referring to as wasted. 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.

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busymom0 1y ago

In weightlifting, it's similar to progressive overload giving enough stimulus for the muscles to grow. If you just keep lifting the same weight over and over again, your muscles get used to it and no longer grow. However, if you slowly keep increasing the stimulus by either increasing weights, or increasing the reps/sets, or slowing the tempo, then it gives your muscles a reason to adapt and grow to be able to handle the new load.

BrenBarn 1y ago

The law of conservation of intelligence: smarter technology leads to dumber humans.

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herbertl 1y ago

> You need to deliberately prioritize your growth and choose to go against the current. You need to deliberately introduce friction to the process. This resonates! Doing things the long, hard, stupid way is the extreme version/application of this opinion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41512207 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-voluntary-discomfort/ https://herbertlui.net/personal-growth-happens-after-volunta...

cheema33 1y ago

We should all be programming in assembly. Or better, 0s and 1s. We are missing out on great friction and growth by programming in higher level languages. 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.

Animats 1y ago

"ChatGPT and by extension “AI” is likely the biggest “revolution” of my generation. It is likely also going to be the biggest killer of creativity in my generation. I always thought the creativity killer was going to be access to infinite entertainment. I think I was wrong." 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 ..."

dzink 1y ago
Maybe by then people will figure out entertainment is mostly a waste of time and ditch the pursuit of it. Hopefully for something more purpose-driven.
- Animats 1y ago
  Could be the demise of a common popular culture. Everyone will have their own private bubble.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- 64718283661 1y ago
  Entertainment is only a waste of time if you do it alone

hoss1474489 1y ago

Effort is the algorithm. (Presentation on learning in the age of AI by the Veritasium guy) https://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70 https://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70

dzink 1y ago

Reading only the title, I thought this was going to be about how little startups can only grow if the are solving some real friction for users, instead of something that can be solved by a user with just a couple of extra queries to ChatGPT. If remembering your company’s niche when it’s needed and finding the credentials to log in is more effort than solving the problem with newer LLM’s, the growth may not be exponential. But then the content turned to be about personal growth.

kiriberty 1y ago

"When I was a child in Sri Lanka, I ended up memorizing the landline numbers of all my close relatives. To this day I remember them. The moment I got a phone where my contacts could be saved, I stopped remembering numbers." 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.

brailsafe 1y ago
> If we look at it rationally, the phone numbers were an extra complexity layer introduced by technology 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.

feiss 1y ago

Stop thinking in terms of current generations and today's LLMs. Your mind has matured in a pre-AI world (even pre-internet), and we are using LLMs with that background . 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.

qgin 1y ago

Your brain needs a loss function just as much as a model does.

hunkmuller0 1y ago

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catchcatchcatch 1y ago

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4Dimensionbeing 1y ago

Your idea of necessary friction is universal. Friction is not a bug in biology; it’s the feature that keeps systems alive and adaptive. Bones mineralize under load and thin without it; muscles hypertrophy with strain and atrophy in a cast; immune networks calibrate by meeting antigens, not by hiding from them. At the cellular level, survival isn’t guaranteed - deprived of trophic signals or mechanical challenge, many cells default to apoptosis, a programmed self-destruct that enforces “use it or lose it.” In other words, life is written to respond to calibrated challenge: too little challenge invites decay, the right dose drives renewal and growth. 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.

jfarmer 1y ago

From John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, the fallacy that "Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned." “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.”