Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?

I’ve been working on a product for a little while that Ivan Illich would call a “convivial tool,” one that doesn’t take from the user but makes them more effective, independent, and creative from its use. I’ve been interested in these kinds of tools for a long time, but I feel some sense of urgency in the LLM era, where I’ve already seen peers lose their edge by offloading the cognitive work.

I’ve been interested in these kinds of tools for a while, that actually act as a bicycle for the mind. Most apps forgo the metacognitive and emotional labor that actually helps people learn effectively in favor of gamification because 1. Modeling these skills is hard 2. The first step to building effective learning habits is to restore the so-called “learn drive” which is the love of learning, play, and tinkering that underlies most effective learning and gamification does so but on an artificial level.

There is so much content out there, and a sufficiently motivated person will find it and make meaning out of it. Most people are not motivated and don’t know how to motivate, meander, explore without gritting teeth, and I think you’ll probably just see churn without gamification unless you deal with that side of the process.

Since I've tried to ship such tools before and ultimately failed, I’m explicitly not doing the whole SV fail fast and iterate thing here: I’m meandering, taking my time, letting motivation move me when it strikes versus going for the easiest or most obvious thing.

(also sorry if this is itself meandering: I’m lifting while typing this on my phone)

your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter (non-ironically!)

"Offloading the cognitive work" - maybe some people become less with AI - think of akin to a calculator.

I'm brilliant.

I do math better with a calculator. So does everyone, my brilliance doesn't change that I am human, a calculator will not forget to carry a one to oversimplify, it is smarter to accurate use a calculator to do math problems... is there something wrong with that?

Why is this different?

It's probably good for young people to learn to do arithmetic by hand. I think you'd lose some important cognitive ability if you never learned arithmetic other than to punch things into a calculator. Not so much because of arithmetic itself, but because you learn how to do careful step-by-step operations, surely an important general cognitive ability.

Once you can do it by hand, by all means use a calculator for speed and accuracy.