Maxims That Sound Deep but Tell You Nothing

There is a class of sayings that carry an air of profundity while providing no guidance whatever. They all fail the same way, and once you see the failure mode you can spot new instances immediately.

The failure is this: you have no way of knowing when to apply them. A rule that cannot tell you whether the case in front of you is one of its cases is not a rule. It is a decoration.

"Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing and Expecting Different Results"

Attributed to Einstein, almost certainly apocryphal, and stupid either way.

It assumes a deterministic world in which repetition reliably yields repetition. That is frequently false. Conditions change, and what fails today may work tomorrow.

Try to build a democracy in an illiterate agrarian state and it collapses. The state industrialises, literacy becomes general, a middle class appears. Try again and it holds. Same action, different result — because the world moved underneath it.

The maxim, applied faithfully, would have told you not to try the second time.

"You Cannot Step Into the Same River Twice"

Now notice that this asserts the opposite: that everything is always changing, so repetition is impossible in principle.

Also false. Plenty of systems are stable enough that the same attempt yields the same outcome, which is why engineering works and why experiments replicate.

Two revered maxims that directly negate each other is itself the tell. If both are available and both sound wise, then neither is doing any work — you will reach for whichever one licenses the conclusion you already favoured.

The real question in any actual case is: has the relevant thing changed, how much, and in which respect? That is always specific to the case, and it is exactly what neither maxim can supply.

"Everything in Moderation" / Never Push a Parameter to Its Limit

True sometimes.

Tax rates are the honest example. Set them at zero and nothing can be funded. Set them at a hundred per cent and you destroy the incentive to work and guarantee evasion. There is an interior optimum, and neither extreme is it.

But watch who reaches for the maxim. It is overwhelmingly deployed by people resisting a change, and the resistance is what is doing the work rather than the principle.

Two centuries ago, proposing that everyone should vote — women included — would have been called radical on exactly these grounds. You are pushing a parameter to one hundred per cent, its maximum possible value; let us not be extreme; surely the moderate position is somewhere below universal suffrage.

That argument was available, it sounded reasonable, and it was wrong. Universal suffrage was beneficial and nobody now regards it as a failure of moderation.

So: one case where pushing to the limit is a mistake, one where it is correct. The maxim cannot distinguish them, which means it contributes nothing to either judgement.

What They Have in Common

In all three cases the maxim states something that is sometimes true, offers no criterion for when, and thereby licenses whatever the speaker wanted to say.

That is worse than useless, because it launders a preference as a principle. The person quoting the maxim has not reasoned; he has found a respectable form of words for a conclusion he arrived at otherwise, and the respectability discourages the follow-up question.

The follow-up question is always the same, and it is always the whole of the work: what about this particular case makes the maxim apply? If there is an answer, the answer is the argument and the maxim was decoration. If there is no answer, there was never an argument at all.