This feels like a post that will be a classic. It puts things I've thought about before but never paid full attention to into very clear words. I'll probably be referring people to this.
I do feel that it could have benefitted from slightly more examples in places where you go a little abstract, perhaps hidden away in footnotes, but overall it is excellent.
It is interesting that despite freedom of religion, even highly spiritual people often don't pray regularly, despite no formal barriers. The obstacle is friction: the simple need to redirect attention.
Social friction once regulated behavior effectively, but modern norms have weakened this mechanism. This makes social enforcement nearly impossible. For example, while it's still socially acceptable to mock someone for being a prude, it's politically unviable to look down on someone for, say, engaging in promiscuous behavior.
Consider business ethics: The Bible's rules about honest weights and measures were both religious laws and community standards.
With social friction diminished, we increasingly rely on legal rather than cultural enforcement, replacing informal community standards with formal laws.
Is it really an improvement to go from "what will my neighbors think" to "what will my lawyer think"?
> Is it really an improvement to go from "what will my neighbors think" to "what will my lawyer think"?
This is a great point, because if we're limited to "legality," many more commons get destroyed.
And it gets even worse, because even faith in the law and legal system is eroding, for a number of reasons:
1. The power of money in what laws get written and what legal consequences get enforced
2. Polarization and perception of politics for same
3. Perception of unreasonable race/class standards in sentencing
4. Differing theories of morals (libertarianism vs economic justice (Luigi))
5. Perceptions of militarization of the police
6. Perception of inscrutability/lack of humanity in modern bureaucracy.
7. Infinite copyright extensions, courtesy of The Mouse
8. Stupid patents that are mainly about weaponizing a patent portfolio and locking in entrenched advantages for big players (algorithms, rounded corners, one click buying)
9. Prosecutorial discretion both railroading the vast majority of people into shitty plea deals on one end, and making property crime and theft ubiquitous and unpoliced on the other
So this is obviously not great. A society that can't agree on "right and wrong" is already kind of screwed, because you have no way to police assholes and anti-social behavior except in your own very local networks, so the commons gets destroyed.
But the "even faith in the law is on the way out" problem is several steps worse than that, because "the law" is basically the only universal consensus we have on "right or wrong" that people can agree to in a heterogenous world of moral relativism and not being able to criticize other people's cultures or decisions.
And as far as I can tell, this has no solution, it's an inadequate equilibrium and Molochian coordination problem.
Formal and legal systems have *far* less malleability than informal systems. There's only so much you can do with a legal rule, because it has to be legible and fair. Informal rules can make room for intuition and specific circumstances that were not considered in advance.
Mercy, for instance, is something that you could never put into a formal system but works really well in informal systems.
Although I think Zvi is correct that AI has the potential to blow up a lot of systems, I think the major damage happened with the Industrial Revolution. We had the power to make a lot more stuff legible, predictable, and known. We've just been supercharging that change ever since.
Gesturing: Friction is an important and often neglected subset of incentives that share key properties and allow us to have this discussion a lot better, and gives me a future handle to point to when looking at this subclass going forward, where we previously lacked such a handle.
And yes, a lot of this generalizes to all incentives, but also friction is a lot more 'incentive-efficient' at impacting behavior relative to many other incentives, which is part of the idea here.
In practice, I keep trying to describe this dynamic of friction going down, and I don't see how to use the word 'incentive' there. Saying 'we made the incentives to bet on sports stronger' (or against it weaker) doesn't communicate well here.
Using "friction" reduces the friction of writing about this in a memorable way. Saying "reducing negative incentives" increases the friction of reading and writing about it.
It also directs attention to innocuous sounding measures that are high leverage due to quirks in human psychology. "Changing incentives" is a broad landscape and thinking first in terms of friction usefully focuses the scope of possible solutions.
I don't keep junk food in my house. I can have it if I want it but I have to go buy it.
There's a lot of low hanging fruit in the class of solutions that sound like "just don't keep the sports book in the house".
"Secrecy is its own form of friction, the purposeful imposition of scarcity on valuable knowledge. It speaks to what will be valuable in an AI-denominated future: yes, the real world and human-denominated industries will rise in economic value, but so will the tools and infrastructure that both drive original research and discoveries, and the mechanisms to price it. The power of AI, at least on our current trajectory, comes from knowing everything; the (perhaps doomed) response of many will be to build walls, toll gates, and marketplaces to protect and harvest the fruits of their human expeditions."
"If there is a single phrase that describes the effect of the Internet, it is the elimination of friction. With the loss of friction, there is necessarily the loss of everything built on friction, including value, privacy, and livelihoods. And that’s only three examples! The Internet is pulling out the foundations of nearly every institution and social more that our society is built upon."
Interesting. This should have the effect of increasing the value, or at least relative value, of all physical things. Especially physical things that are naturally limited, such as land and housing.
In the final section, I can't think of how to apply most of these to my life. It would be useful to have an example of each of the recommendations.
And: "You’re also allowed to say, essentially ‘if we can’t put this into [1] without it being in [0] then it needs to be in [2] ... " -- This is because the benefit of friction is sometimes an inverted U, right? In this example, the unsaid detail is that [1] would be best, but [0] would be worse than [2], I think.
I think his point is a little different. Specifically that something may be really good in a steady state of [1], but really bad in a state of [0]. If it can't remain in [1] and [0] is bad, then you have to make it [2] to prevent it from going to [0], even if you would ultimately prefer that it be [1].
Thank you for this post! Building up on Scott's original seminal trivial inconveniences and classifying and formalizing the intuitive informal friction that already exists in the society is probably as important as other important concepts Zvi introduced, like slack and simulacra levels.
Great post, I laughed out loud at "Physically impossible (e.g. perpetual motion, time travel, reading all my blog posts)" - quickly becoming true at the rate you're publishing them!
At the most fundamental level of physics, if friction did not exist, WE would not exist. And nothing around us would exist. I appreciate this discussion of friction in society, but I think that a minimum amount of friction in our day-to-day existence is not a bad thing. The goal is not to eliminate it entirely, but to find the Goldilocks level that makes things work, without too much aggravation.
A major drawback with certain ways of implementing Category 2 is that the willingness to overcome such friction sometimes correlates with traits you *don't* want to reward: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html (warning: moderately NSFW language). Unless you're *very* sure of which people the friction is going to deter the least and agree that they are the ones who *should* be deterred the least, you'd better avoid placing things in 2 and decide whether it's less bad to place them in 1 or 3 (possibly splitting them into sub-things some of which go in 1 and others in 3).
A lot of things related to childcare and raising kids falls into this. There are people who don't care at all about social services and are mildly abusive to their kids. Category 2 prohibitions don't work on them very well. Category 2 works almost too well on another class of people, making them far less likely to have kids at all. You almost need to make childcare related issues Category 1 and encourage people to have kids even if they do a bad job, or Category 3 and actually punish the non-compliance. Category 2 is a bad fit.
Definitely going in the Classic Reference Posts list. Sort of surprised not to see a backlink to the subsection you were previously calling "The Big Sort" - this post is more generic, but in the AI context I felt that was a good existing catch-all.
God knows I try to read every post. I think I've only intentionally dropped a couple that were part of your contest submission to...some Anthropic thing? Crazy long lists that didn't have enough reference handles to chunk effectively. Athough I blame Yud for one of those, since you were responding to A List of Lethalities, which is just...superlative overkill levels of excess wordcel damage. (But then there's also Aikido Sports and the old Wordpress backlog, so that 100% completion blog achievement badge is still well out of reach. Sad!)
A grocer's friction confession: I get to decide how products are merchandised in my department, and of course have full access to historical sales data. We're supposed to minimize consumer friction by always putting the best-selling items at the most attractive, easiest-to-notice-and-reach places ("keep it shoppable"). Eye level for shelves, front rows for bins, etc. Things that sell less well get exiled to the shitty real estate; it's amazing how many people are disinclined to reach up or squat down to grab something, or ask for employee assistance in such endeavor. Oftentimes they'll simply not purchase at all.
However, it's annoying for me to constantly order a great deal of best-selling X and only infrequently order niche product Y (most things are ordered by the case, not by the unit, so slow sellers just sit around). So I sometimes...intentionally equalize friction, by putting historical best-sellers in the harder to reach locations, and giving prime real estate to niche goods. This lets me keep a more even mix of ordering [X, X, X, Y, Y] instead of [X, X, X, X, Y].
It's kind of wild how often people turn out to be indifferent in practice between substitute goods. Switch the ravioli? Whichever's in front becomes the best-seller...friction effects rule everything around me, at least in Retail Land. Makes one wonder just how revealed those preferences are, and how many "popular" products are only so due to historical accidents of such arbitrary merchandising decisions.
Thanks for clearly explaining why Some Friction Is Good, Actually. Our society is built assuming friction, so reducing friction without thought for the consequences is A Bad Idea.
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/levels-of-friction
This feels like a post that will be a classic. It puts things I've thought about before but never paid full attention to into very clear words. I'll probably be referring people to this.
I do feel that it could have benefitted from slightly more examples in places where you go a little abstract, perhaps hidden away in footnotes, but overall it is excellent.
Thanks for writing it.
It is interesting that despite freedom of religion, even highly spiritual people often don't pray regularly, despite no formal barriers. The obstacle is friction: the simple need to redirect attention.
Social friction once regulated behavior effectively, but modern norms have weakened this mechanism. This makes social enforcement nearly impossible. For example, while it's still socially acceptable to mock someone for being a prude, it's politically unviable to look down on someone for, say, engaging in promiscuous behavior.
Consider business ethics: The Bible's rules about honest weights and measures were both religious laws and community standards.
With social friction diminished, we increasingly rely on legal rather than cultural enforcement, replacing informal community standards with formal laws.
Is it really an improvement to go from "what will my neighbors think" to "what will my lawyer think"?
It seems like we need to consider what has become easier for our attention than intentional prayer?
> Is it really an improvement to go from "what will my neighbors think" to "what will my lawyer think"?
This is a great point, because if we're limited to "legality," many more commons get destroyed.
And it gets even worse, because even faith in the law and legal system is eroding, for a number of reasons:
1. The power of money in what laws get written and what legal consequences get enforced
2. Polarization and perception of politics for same
3. Perception of unreasonable race/class standards in sentencing
4. Differing theories of morals (libertarianism vs economic justice (Luigi))
5. Perceptions of militarization of the police
6. Perception of inscrutability/lack of humanity in modern bureaucracy.
7. Infinite copyright extensions, courtesy of The Mouse
8. Stupid patents that are mainly about weaponizing a patent portfolio and locking in entrenched advantages for big players (algorithms, rounded corners, one click buying)
9. Prosecutorial discretion both railroading the vast majority of people into shitty plea deals on one end, and making property crime and theft ubiquitous and unpoliced on the other
So this is obviously not great. A society that can't agree on "right and wrong" is already kind of screwed, because you have no way to police assholes and anti-social behavior except in your own very local networks, so the commons gets destroyed.
But the "even faith in the law is on the way out" problem is several steps worse than that, because "the law" is basically the only universal consensus we have on "right or wrong" that people can agree to in a heterogenous world of moral relativism and not being able to criticize other people's cultures or decisions.
And as far as I can tell, this has no solution, it's an inadequate equilibrium and Molochian coordination problem.
Formal and legal systems have *far* less malleability than informal systems. There's only so much you can do with a legal rule, because it has to be legible and fair. Informal rules can make room for intuition and specific circumstances that were not considered in advance.
Mercy, for instance, is something that you could never put into a formal system but works really well in informal systems.
Although I think Zvi is correct that AI has the potential to blow up a lot of systems, I think the major damage happened with the Industrial Revolution. We had the power to make a lot more stuff legible, predictable, and known. We've just been supercharging that change ever since.
one of my favorite of your pieces -- well done.
What does the term "friction" accomplish that cannot be accomplished by using the term "incentives"?
Gesturing: Friction is an important and often neglected subset of incentives that share key properties and allow us to have this discussion a lot better, and gives me a future handle to point to when looking at this subclass going forward, where we previously lacked such a handle.
And yes, a lot of this generalizes to all incentives, but also friction is a lot more 'incentive-efficient' at impacting behavior relative to many other incentives, which is part of the idea here.
In practice, I keep trying to describe this dynamic of friction going down, and I don't see how to use the word 'incentive' there. Saying 'we made the incentives to bet on sports stronger' (or against it weaker) doesn't communicate well here.
So incentives can be broken down into positives and negatives. Frictions are a negative incentive.
Using "friction" reduces the friction of writing about this in a memorable way. Saying "reducing negative incentives" increases the friction of reading and writing about it.
It also directs attention to innocuous sounding measures that are high leverage due to quirks in human psychology. "Changing incentives" is a broad landscape and thinking first in terms of friction usefully focuses the scope of possible solutions.
I don't keep junk food in my house. I can have it if I want it but I have to go buy it.
There's a lot of low hanging fruit in the class of solutions that sound like "just don't keep the sports book in the house".
Conclusion of today's Stratechery https://stratechery.com/2025/deep-research-and-knowledge-value/ :
"Secrecy is its own form of friction, the purposeful imposition of scarcity on valuable knowledge. It speaks to what will be valuable in an AI-denominated future: yes, the real world and human-denominated industries will rise in economic value, but so will the tools and infrastructure that both drive original research and discoveries, and the mechanisms to price it. The power of AI, at least on our current trajectory, comes from knowing everything; the (perhaps doomed) response of many will be to build walls, toll gates, and marketplaces to protect and harvest the fruits of their human expeditions."
which also has a shoutout to Ben's 2013 essay "Friction" https://stratechery.com/2013/friction/ :
"If there is a single phrase that describes the effect of the Internet, it is the elimination of friction. With the loss of friction, there is necessarily the loss of everything built on friction, including value, privacy, and livelihoods. And that’s only three examples! The Internet is pulling out the foundations of nearly every institution and social more that our society is built upon."
Interesting. This should have the effect of increasing the value, or at least relative value, of all physical things. Especially physical things that are naturally limited, such as land and housing.
In the final section, I can't think of how to apply most of these to my life. It would be useful to have an example of each of the recommendations.
And: "You’re also allowed to say, essentially ‘if we can’t put this into [1] without it being in [0] then it needs to be in [2] ... " -- This is because the benefit of friction is sometimes an inverted U, right? In this example, the unsaid detail is that [1] would be best, but [0] would be worse than [2], I think.
I think his point is a little different. Specifically that something may be really good in a steady state of [1], but really bad in a state of [0]. If it can't remain in [1] and [0] is bad, then you have to make it [2] to prevent it from going to [0], even if you would ultimately prefer that it be [1].
Thank you for this post! Building up on Scott's original seminal trivial inconveniences and classifying and formalizing the intuitive informal friction that already exists in the society is probably as important as other important concepts Zvi introduced, like slack and simulacra levels.
Great post, I laughed out loud at "Physically impossible (e.g. perpetual motion, time travel, reading all my blog posts)" - quickly becoming true at the rate you're publishing them!
So did I!!!
At the most fundamental level of physics, if friction did not exist, WE would not exist. And nothing around us would exist. I appreciate this discussion of friction in society, but I think that a minimum amount of friction in our day-to-day existence is not a bad thing. The goal is not to eliminate it entirely, but to find the Goldilocks level that makes things work, without too much aggravation.
A major drawback with certain ways of implementing Category 2 is that the willingness to overcome such friction sometimes correlates with traits you *don't* want to reward: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html (warning: moderately NSFW language). Unless you're *very* sure of which people the friction is going to deter the least and agree that they are the ones who *should* be deterred the least, you'd better avoid placing things in 2 and decide whether it's less bad to place them in 1 or 3 (possibly splitting them into sub-things some of which go in 1 and others in 3).
A lot of things related to childcare and raising kids falls into this. There are people who don't care at all about social services and are mildly abusive to their kids. Category 2 prohibitions don't work on them very well. Category 2 works almost too well on another class of people, making them far less likely to have kids at all. You almost need to make childcare related issues Category 1 and encourage people to have kids even if they do a bad job, or Category 3 and actually punish the non-compliance. Category 2 is a bad fit.
An interesting point! It’s crazy how sometimes making things easier or more convenient can actually lead to more problems 😄
Definitely going in the Classic Reference Posts list. Sort of surprised not to see a backlink to the subsection you were previously calling "The Big Sort" - this post is more generic, but in the AI context I felt that was a good existing catch-all.
God knows I try to read every post. I think I've only intentionally dropped a couple that were part of your contest submission to...some Anthropic thing? Crazy long lists that didn't have enough reference handles to chunk effectively. Athough I blame Yud for one of those, since you were responding to A List of Lethalities, which is just...superlative overkill levels of excess wordcel damage. (But then there's also Aikido Sports and the old Wordpress backlog, so that 100% completion blog achievement badge is still well out of reach. Sad!)
A grocer's friction confession: I get to decide how products are merchandised in my department, and of course have full access to historical sales data. We're supposed to minimize consumer friction by always putting the best-selling items at the most attractive, easiest-to-notice-and-reach places ("keep it shoppable"). Eye level for shelves, front rows for bins, etc. Things that sell less well get exiled to the shitty real estate; it's amazing how many people are disinclined to reach up or squat down to grab something, or ask for employee assistance in such endeavor. Oftentimes they'll simply not purchase at all.
However, it's annoying for me to constantly order a great deal of best-selling X and only infrequently order niche product Y (most things are ordered by the case, not by the unit, so slow sellers just sit around). So I sometimes...intentionally equalize friction, by putting historical best-sellers in the harder to reach locations, and giving prime real estate to niche goods. This lets me keep a more even mix of ordering [X, X, X, Y, Y] instead of [X, X, X, X, Y].
It's kind of wild how often people turn out to be indifferent in practice between substitute goods. Switch the ravioli? Whichever's in front becomes the best-seller...friction effects rule everything around me, at least in Retail Land. Makes one wonder just how revealed those preferences are, and how many "popular" products are only so due to historical accidents of such arbitrary merchandising decisions.
Thanks for clearly explaining why Some Friction Is Good, Actually. Our society is built assuming friction, so reducing friction without thought for the consequences is A Bad Idea.
The elegance of how you explicitly address nuance.