Centurii chan

I'll tell you why these two situations are different.

In the case of the electric burner:

• Ceramic top electric burners transfer heat by IR radiation, which leaves the surface of the burner in the shape of a very wide cone. By lifting the frying pan above the burner you are probably creating optical paths by which that IR light can go to places other than the bottom of your pan. Moving away from a heat source like this lowers its intensity not because the energy disappears, but because it spreads out over a greater area. If the stove heated the pan with an IR laser it almost wouldn't matter how far away it was (there would still be a small amount of loss from air absorption). Potentially you could change the electric burner by adding IR reflectors around the gap between the burner and the pan, but reflection isn't 100% efficient either, so there would still be some losses compared to just pressing the pan directly against the burner.
• They try to make the glass ceramic material that these stovetops are made of as IR transparent as possible, so that most of the energy ends up in the pan instead of in the ceramic. But they aren't perfect, and even without a pan sitting on top of them the material will become quite hot. This is relevant because heat flows from hot areas to cold areas, the larger the temperature difference the greater the rate of heat flow. As such, seperating the pan from the ceramic surface in this situation wouldn't make much of a difference. To be clear its not good that some of the energy goes into the ceramic instead of the pan, but that's the difference it makes for this comparison.

In the case of induction cooking:

• The induction coils magnetically couple to the pan that sits on top of them. This is a near-field effect, not a radiative one, so things like optical paths and the square cube law do not apply. In fact if you remove a pan from an induction cooktop the energy will have nowhere to go but back into the coils and driver circuit. Most induction cooktops will shut off in this situation because they aren't designed to be able to reabsorb that energy (the wok ones seem to be a little more tolerant of this though).
• The ceramic is essentially completely transparent to magnetic fields, and isn't heated by them to any appreciable degree. As such the ceramic surface in an induction cooktop will be relatively cold. Any heating that the surface experiences is a result of pulling heat out of the pan on top of it.

In other words with induction cooking heat appears inside the metal of the cookware without a need for there to be a path by which it can enter. Because of that you can eliminate the paths by which it could exit.

I should say though that the glass ceramics that cooktops are made of are actually pretty good thermal insulators (as evidenced by the fact that, even in an electric cooktop, the entire surface doesn't get hot, just the area above and right next to the burner). I don't know if they are better insulators than a centimeter or so of air, but if so then separating the pan from ceramic surface might actually be detrimental, like taking off a blanket when you're cold. But if this is the case then it would be detrimental for the opposite reason: because you would be reducing the insulation.

With a resistive, electric burner, your point is valid, but we are talking about an inductive range. They don't work by conducting heat from the range to the pan. They work by inducing an electric current in the pan itself. The heat is produced within the metal of the pan, not within the range. The pan does, indeed, need to be thermally insulated from the range to minimize heat loss.