Consider the quote:

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

-Albert Einstein

Of course, that’s not the definition of insanity, and Einstein didn’t say it (despite the quote often being attributed to him). For those reasons, it sounds pretty stupid. But I would argue there is something wise about the quote and that it’s worth paying attention to.

If we are in a situation that’s deterministic and static – that is, nothing is changing, and nothing is random – then it’s absolutely true that doing the same thing over and over again won’t lead to different results. And, while real life is never perfectly static, and there’s an element of uncertainty in much of what we do, we sometimes do find ourselves in situations that are static and deterministic enough that trying the same thing we’ve always tried would be foolish.

And yet, it’s not so uncommon for people to continue using the same failed strategies over and over again. Let’s call these situations “Futility Loops” – where we try the same strategy over and over even though it has failed every time, and we have ample evidence to suggest it will continue to fail.

Here are a few examples I’ve witnessed myself:

•Someone trying to get a family member to change a harmful behavior by nudging them in the same way, year after year, even though it never works. For instance, by making the same kind of remarks that bother the other person but never get them to alter their behavior.

• Someone who is depressed and stuck in a bad life situation, making the same life choices again and again that leave him stuck in that same spot. For instance, by not taking any actions that could plausibly improve his depression.

• Someone who makes the same sort of bad relationship decisions again and again with each new relationship. For instance, getting into relationships with a certain type of personality that they are attracted to inevitably badly hurts them.

These are fairly obvious examples of Futility Loops, but I also see much more subtle examples (which I’ve engaged in myself): where your behavior isn’t exactly the same, and the situation isn’t exactly the same, so it is easy to miss the fact that it’s a Futility Loop. But the situations and your behaviors rhyme each time – effectively, you keep trying to apply a strategy that the world keeps telling you doesn’t work, but you don’t realize the pattern because each situation feels different enough not to notice.

In Futility Loops, whether the more obvious kind or the more subtle kind, a person repeatedly does the same behaviors that have never worked before, and of course, it doesn’t work this time either, leaving the bad situations to endlessly repeat – there does seem to be something insane about the behavior like the fake Einstein quote suggests.

But if we adopt another frame, where we view the person involved as part of the situation itself, the behavior is understandable and not really insane at all. The person themself hasn’t changed, so when they are thrust into the same bad situation, they engage in the same useless behavior. They have static habits, instincts, emotions, reactions, and so on, so when the same situation arises, their behavior is just what it was before – they are static, and the situation is static, so their behavior is static.

From this point of view, we see that they will be stuck in the Futility Loop until something changes: either something in the situation or something within themselves. But if they aren’t willing to wait until the situation luckily changes on its own, that leaves only one option: self-change.

Thankfully, the self-change doesn’t have to be profound to break out of this sort of loop. All you really need to do is recognize that:

(a) what you have been trying so far hasn’t worked

(b) if you try the same thing again, it’s likely to lead to the same outcome, and

(c) as Eliezer Yudkowsky put it: “Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change; you can’t do anything BETTER unless you can manage to do it DIFFERENTLY.”

Then you just need to try a different strategy. And if that strategy proves itself not to work, don’t get stuck on that one either – try yet another strategy. And so on.

It may be worth taking a moment to reflect: which situations may be a Futility Loop for you? Is there a type of bad situation that keeps repeating – and could it be that you’re trying to solve it each time with a strategy that doesn’t work? For instance, is there a person whose behavior you keep trying to nudge in the same way, even though it never helps? Is there a kind of person you keep being drawn with predictably bad outcomes? Is there a type of decision you routinely have to make where you apply the same ineffective approach?

The first step to breaking out of our Futility Loops is to identify them.

This piece was first written on September 18, 2024, and first appeared on my website on November 3, 2024.

A. our theoretical understanding of what things are “really” like (physics, atoms, etc.)

with

B. our direct, first-hand experiences as humans.

Examples:

(1) Ethics – most people experience a visceral feeling that some things are inherently and universally morally wrong (e.g., murdering children). Yet it’s unclear what, in the universe of atoms (or in physics), could make (or explain) something being “wrong.”

(2) Free will – we feel as though we constantly make choices (e.g., picking options that we didn’t have to pick). Yet the possibility of choices is hard to square with the existence of laws of physics as we know them. Where could a choice possibly fit into those laws?

(3) Consciousness – we each know we are conscious (in the sense of having experiences / there being something it is like to be us) because we directly witness our own experiences. Yet it’s unclear how or why configurations of atoms could ever give rise to internal experiences.

(4) Identity – we feel like we have a unique, persistent, indivisible identity. Yet, if we imagine thought experiments involving splitting, copying, or rebuilding brains in the physical world, it’s hard to see how a unitary identity could be maintained in those circumstances.

(5) Knowledge – there seem to be many things we each intuitively know to be true (our own names, what orange juice tastes like, how to tie our shoelaces), yet it’s hard to explain what the state of “knowing” these things corresponds to in the world, or to define what “knowing” is.

(6) Mathematics – we all know it’s true that 1+1 = 2 and that the number 2 “exists” in some sense. But it’s hard to say in what sense this is true/existent because numbers and addition don’t seem to exist in the physical realm the way that, say, a particular sandwich does.

This piece was first written on December 23, 2020, and first appeared on this site on April 17, 2023.