logoalt Hacker News

TeMPOraLtoday at 9:54 AM0 repliesview on HN

The term I know / used for this is "trivial inconveniences", via an old article of Scott Alexander[0].

The quote from example from early in the article stuck with me for years:

Think about this for a second. The human longing for freedom of information is a terrible and wonderful thing. It delineates a pivotal difference between mental emancipation and slavery. It has launched protests, rebellions, and revolutions. Thousands have devoted their lives to it, thousands of others have even died for it. And it can be stopped dead in its tracks by requiring people to search for "how to set up proxy" before viewing their anti-government website.

(Now this is more poetic, but I suppose the much more insightful example that also stuck with me is given later - companies enticing you to buy by offering free money, knowing well that most customers can't be arsed to fill out a form to actually get that money.)

--

[0] - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/reitXJgJXFzKpdKyd/beware-tri...