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Why friction is necessary for growth

(jameelur.com)
158 points WanderingSoul | 5 comments | 29 Sep 25 13:39 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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gwd ◴[29 Sep 25 16:30 UTC] No.45415701[source]▶
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.

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1. RyanOD ◴[29 Sep 25 17:26 UTC] No.45416414[source]▶
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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2. beardedetim ◴[29 Sep 25 17:50 UTC] No.45416688[source]▶
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.
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3. Retric ◴[29 Sep 25 18:06 UTC] No.45416868[source]▶
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.

4. RyanOD ◴[29 Sep 25 18:10 UTC] No.45416908[source]▶
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.

5. sph ◴[30 Sep 25 09:04 UTC] No.45423450[source]▶
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.