Why friction is necessary for growth

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.

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.

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.

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

This is a good callout/distinction you're making. How we view the goal of the experience determines our experience itself. The guitar analogy is really good because if your goal was to learn guitar, it's definitely not wasted but if your goal was to learn this one specific song as quickly as possible, I could see how my perspective would be different.

Learning in such a random fashion is entertaining, but not particularly productive.

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.

Yes, this is all goal dependent. I can agree with that.

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.

Not sure how it translates outside of the physics space, but I'm pretty sure if one is trying to go up a hill, more friction would equal less effort. Because if there's less friction, then I think I would fight more against gravity?

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.

You articulated it better than I was going to.

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.

In a friction-less environment, effort produces no progress. Thank you for coming to my HN rebuttal.

All analogies are wrong, but some are useful.

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.

nit: the grippy friction is actually static friction, which is different from kinetic friction, which is closer to what the article is referring to. Kinetic friction dissipates energy from objects in motion, similar to how when we're trying to get things done, we are moving and doing things, but jankiness and other sources of (kinetic) friction drag us down.

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.

No try biking up that hill without friction you can expend infinite effort but without friction you'll not get anywhere. The tire will spin and spin but with no friction you'd have no forward force applied. That is if you muscles could work without friction that might work but the spining of the chain and all the other details don't work without friction.

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.

I’m gonna be that guy. Reminds me of AI coding: sure, it gets you to the goal faster, but you lose the opportunity to learn, improve or find a smarter way of solving your problem.

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.