Comment by freehorse

That's a good point. And yeah I got the term from Tao, as I had not described it this way before but I think it elucidates well the issue.

The problem imo is that, from a purely psychological/phenomenological perspective, there is not always a perceivable difference between "eutripsis" and "dystripsis" (just made it up but "dys" is the opposite of "eu") as experienced. There is some reward coming from learning through friction (depending on personal interests, environment etc), but mostly it is effort and humans usually try to reduce or avoid effort.

Moreover, even if one tries to be fully mindful and choose where to employ friction and where not, there could be systemic factors to optimise away any kind of friction. Imo we already see that in software engineering, judging from a lot of different anecdotes, where increasing the pace of generating code sacrifising human understanding is already taking place. It is not like these forces are not already in place widely in academia too even before AI (eg optimising for paper output quantity), so AI reinforcing this direction sounds a reasonably probable scenario, unless some other action is taken.