[HN Gopher] Why friction is necessary for growth
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Why friction is necessary for growth
Author : WanderingSoul
Score : 148 points
Date : 2025-09-29 13:39 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jameelur.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jameelur.com)
| the_snooze wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Necessary but not sufficient, maybe.
| deanputney wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| A related read: 'The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of
| Turning Trials into Triumph' by Ryan Holiday
| rossdavidh wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| ML can do just as good if not better job of product
| recommendations without the risk of hallucinations and is
| cheaper to boot.
| bayindirh wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bayindirh wrote:
| When I think about ads, I think about Google's paper [0],
| which allows multiple self-interested LLMs bid for
| possible ad-spots in the prompt, which is just a
| different flavor of what we have today.
|
| As noted on the thread, a good ML model can do better,
| with less. I can use that kind of recommendation system
| for discovering my alternatives for a given
| item/tech/whatever, on demand.
|
| But current crop of LLMs, with a strong leaning for
| embedding seamless ads into prompt responses, a double
| no. No, because I don't agree on how training data is
| stol ^H^H^H^H collected from wider internet and
| everything, another no for unsolicited ads.
|
| I'll continue using Kagi and being a luddite, thanks.
|
| [0]: https://research.google/blog/mechanism-design-for-
| large-lang...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I guess I should clarify that I want a _broker_ , not
| unsolicited ads.
|
| If LLMs can become true brokers, that would be great, but
| the pressure to corrupt would be tremendous.
|
| Not sure if we'll ever get there, though. I have hope.
| The broker model is centuries old. It's really a solved
| problem. The issue is that the current generation is
| notoriously bad at learning from history.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Yeah, I understand where you're coming from, and I agree,
| LLMs can be good brokers if they can be kept reliable.
|
| > The issue is that the current generation is notoriously
| bad at learning from history.
|
| On top of that, the same people think they can just move
| to another planet and survive by eating money there.
| ares623 wrote:
| It's like nuclear fusion. The power of the sun, to boil
| water.
| ip26 wrote:
| The Internet is funded almost entirely by an ad machine,
| but has a few knock-on benefits people have grown rather
| fond of.
| borroka wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.)
| borroka wrote:
| The comment is fairly condescending, and I don't think it is
| up to the standards of HN.
|
| Of course, you may like whatever you want, but if you compare
| Pink Floyd and Zeppelin to the current landscape, I don't
| think we find an equivalent quality and vision today. And not
| because current musicians (outside the playback- and
| autotune-heavy artists of today) are bad, but because of the
| hanging fruit I was referring to.
|
| Movies today? Books? I am not finding great quality, but it
| is possible that, compared to others, I have a more refined
| palate.
| Mouvelie wrote:
| I always say that time is the best filter.
|
| In the moment, you can be easily mistaken that something is
| good, or the best even if the marketing team of that something
| is really going hard at your wallet. But the only way, and they
| know it too well, to assess quality is to simply...wait and see
| later.
|
| If you need a proof, here's one :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookshop_Memories The "it was
| better before" is not a recent phenomenon, I think.
| borroka wrote:
| In fact, I wrote about the selection effect, but that "it was
| better before" is not holding up in my example, at least the
| one I had in mind.
|
| Some decades in the past were not particularly good in terms
| of literary output (I am very familiar with literature in my
| native language and know much more than average in two or
| three other languages), but the last decade has been
| incredibly poor. And I suspect that it is becoming
| increasingly difficult to find original ideas. As time goes
| by, the average technical competence of artists almost
| inevitably increases, but the same cannot necessarily be said
| for creativity, for example.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I will leave this here.
|
| Steve Jobs on Crafting Idea to Product
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SQYGSFrJY
|
| Tumbling rocks make them shiny metaphor
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OGQusNS1kcU
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| flux3125 wrote:
| Same for muscles
| dijit wrote:
| Same for brains
| sunlightteacher wrote:
| Hebbian learning
| chrisweekly wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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"
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > 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
| Mouvelie wrote:
| > In a world where one could snap their fingers and magically
| have everything, would "growth" be impossible?
|
| Think this one through. Would growth even make sense ? What
| would be the meaning of getting everything you want ? Would
| such a life be worth it ?
|
| If you ask me, I'd say that such a life would have no meaning
| for anyone involved and as such, maybe the universe would not
| even care to have that experience. I don't know, just
| spitballing there !
| gwd wrote:
| 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.
| miguelacevedo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| RyanOD wrote:
| 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.
| beardedetim wrote:
| 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.
| RyanOD wrote:
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| 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.
| xdavidliu wrote:
| 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.
| zackmorris wrote:
| 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.
|
| -
|
| 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.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| 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.
| holoduke wrote:
| 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.
| busymom0 wrote:
| 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.
| herbertl wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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-volunta...
| BrenBarn wrote:
| The law of conservation of intelligence: smarter technology leads
| to dumber humans.
| cheema33 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _" 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Could be the demise of a common popular culture. Everyone
| will have their own private bubble.
| delichon wrote:
| I wish it worked that way, rather than the existing
| convergence on strange attractors. I'm often amazed at how
| often the people I follow on social media follow each
| other, even those with few obvious connections. Cliques
| form without intent. Everyone has their own private bubble
| ... that ends up largely overlapping with the rest of their
| aspiration group.
| hoss1474489 wrote:
| Effort is the algorithm. (Presentation on learning in the age of
| AI by the Veritasium guy) https://youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70
| dzink wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Your brain needs a loss function just as much as a model does.
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