jfarmer

Universities have IRBs for good reasons.

A responsible farmer is a steward of the local ecology, and there's an "ecology of friction" here. The fertilizer company doesn't say "well, the plants absorbed it." But tech companies do.

There's something puritanical about pointing to "revealed preference" as absolution, I think. When clicking is consent then any downstream damage is a failure of self-control on the user's part. The ecological cost/responsibility is externalized to the organisms being disrupted.

Like Schopenhauer said: "Man kann tun, was er will, aber er kann nicht wollen, was er will." One can do what one wants, but one cannot will what one wants.

I wouldn't go as far as old Arthur, but I do think we should demand a level of "ecological stewardship". Our will is conditioned by our environment and tech companies overtly try to shape that environment.

Friction is an element of the environment like any other. There's an "ecology of friction" we should respect. Deciding friction is bad and should be eradicated is like deciding mosquitoes or spiders or wolves are bad and should be eradicated.

Sometimes friction is noise. Sometimes friction is signal. Sometimes the two can't be separated.

I learned much the same way you did. I also started a coding bootcamp, so I've thought a lot about what counts as "wasted" time.

I think of it like building a road through wilderness. The road gets you there faster, but careless construction disturbs the ecosystem. If you're building the road, you should at least understand its ecological impact.

Much of tech treats friction as an undifferentiated problem to be minimized or eliminated—rather than as part of a living system that plays an ecological role in how we learn and work.

Take Codecademy, which uses a virtual file system with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. Even after mastering the lessons, many learners try the same tasks on their own computers and ask, "Why do I need to put this CSS file in that directory? What does that have to do with my hard drive?"

If they'd learned directly on their own machines, they would have picked up the hard-drive concepts along the way. Instead, they learned a simplified version that, while seemingly more efficient for "learning to code," creates its own kind of waste.

But is that to say the student "should" spend a week struggling? Could they spend a day, say, and still learn what the friction was there to teach? Yes, usually.

Tech has always had a culture of aiming for "frictionless" experiences, but friction is necessary if we want to maneuver and get feedback from the environment. A car can't drive if there's no friction between the tires and the road, despite being helped when there's no friction between the chassis and the air.

Friction isn't fungible.

John Dewey described this rationale in Human Nature and Conduct as thinking that "Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned." He concludes:

”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 are, or when taken universally.”

In "Mind and World", McDowell criticizes this sort of thinking, too, saying:

> We need to conceive this expansive spontaneity as subject to control from outside our thinking, on pain off representing the operations of spontaneity as a frictionless spinning in a void.

And that's really what this is about, I think. Friction-free is the goal but friction-free "thought" isn't thought at all. It's frictionless spinning in a void.

I teach and see this all the time in EdTech. Imagine if students could just ask the robot XYZ and how much time it'd free up! That time could be spent on things like relationship-building with the teacher, new ways of motivating students, etc.

Except...those activities supply the "wants and struggles whose consummations" build the relationships! Maybe the robot could help the student, say, ask better questions to the teacher, or direct the student to peers who were similarly confused but figure it out.

But I think that strikes many tech-minded folks as "inefficient" and "friction-ful". If the robot knows the answer to my question, why slow me down by redirecting me to another person?

This is the same logic that says making dinner is a waste of time and we should all live off nutrient mush. The purposes of preparing dinner is to make something you can eat and the purpose of eating is nutrient acquisition, right? Just beam those nutrients into my bloodstream and skip the rest.

Not sure how to put this all together into something pithy, but I see it all as symptoms of the same cultural impulse. One that's been around for decades and decades, I think.

“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.”

“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.”

> 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 fulfilment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they are, or when taken universally.