Lilac Truth

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Twenty-Two: Doom Loops

Last time, I promised your name and your day in the same sentence. That’s still coming. Something got in the way, and it’s about loops. I’ve been writing about loops for three posts without calling them that.

On day 2,461,318, the same day I posted about the twenty-seventh letter, Futurism ran a story about “doom loops” spreading through the economy. You’ve probably lived some of the examples. Job seekers use AI to write applications for portals that use AI to read them, until recruiters are buried in near-identical pages. Students use AI to finish assignments that their teachers used AI to write. Chatbots summarize the news so smoothly that fewer people visit the newsrooms that made it, so the newsrooms shrink, so there’s less news to summarize.

Daniel Chait, who runs the hiring-software company Greenhouse, described the job market this way: “They’re using AI to solve their own problem, but in ways that make the problem worse.” And: “The more it’s happening, the worse it gets.”

The phrase itself didn’t start with a magazine. It comes from Microsoft. Among the internal documents unsealed in September in The New York Times’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft is this line: “Our AI content strategy has started a ‘doom loop’ that will hurt the performance of our models and the entire web.”

Here’s why it caught me. The digital root is a loop: add the digits, then add those, until one is left. The road to four is a loop: spell a number, count its letters, spell that. Even the alphabet song is a loop. It runs to Z and asks you to sing it again.

Mathematicians call this iteration. Do the same thing to the answer, over and over, and one of three things happens. It settles and stays put, which is called a fixed point. It circles forever, which is a cycle. Or it runs away.

So today the witnesses are loops. I want to know what makes one doom, and how anyone has ever gotten out.

The short version, if you only have a minute: a doom loop is a loop with no one outside it. Every one I could find breaks the same four ways. Turn it down, change the path, feed it the original, or change the rule. The rest of this post is me checking that in public.

House Rules

Same as always. Arithmetic and history can be checked, and the receipts are at the bottom. Coincidences get called coincidences.

One more, because this topic makes people pick a team. I’m not here to tell you machines are evil. I checked every number in this post with one. A hammer isn’t a doom loop. A doom loop is a shape, and the shape is the same whether it’s built out of software, money, or people.

The Rule, Not the Start

Here’s a loop you can run on the back of an envelope.

Pick any four-digit number whose digits aren’t all the same. Arrange the digits from largest to smallest, then from smallest to largest, and subtract. Do it again to the answer. Keep going.

The country turned 250 this year, so let’s start with 1776:

  • 7761 − 1677 = 6084
  • 8640 − 0468 = 8172
  • 8721 − 1278 = 7443
  • 7443 − 3447 = 3996
  • 9963 − 3699 = 6264
  • 6642 − 2466 = 4176
  • 7641 − 1467 = 6174

And there it stops. Run 6174 through the rule and you get 7641 − 1467, which is 6174 again, forever.

Every four-digit number does this. Every one with at least two different digits arrives at 6174 within seven steps. (Seven. Of course it’s seven.) 1776 happens to need all seven. The Indian mathematician D. R. Kaprekar published this in 1955, and 6174 is still called Kaprekar’s constant. Its digits come to 18, then 9.

Here’s what it taught me. You can’t pick your way out of this loop with a better starting number. I tried 1981, the year I was born: five steps. I tried 2026: six. Every road ends at the same house. Where a loop ends up is decided by the rule. Not by where you start, and not by how hard you try.

If the rule leads somewhere good, that’s a blessing. If it leads somewhere bad, that’s a trap. The math is identical.

The Howl

The loop most of us have actually heard is the scream a microphone makes when it gets too close to its own speaker.

The microphone picks up a sound. The speaker plays it louder. The microphone picks up the louder sound. If each trip around comes back even slightly bigger than it left, it grows on every pass until the scream is all there is. Engineers say it in one line: when the gain around the loop is greater than one, the loop runs away. It’s called the Larsen effect, after the Danish scientist Søren Absalon Larsen, who first described how it works.

Every sound tech knows the fixes. Turn it down. Move the microphone. Point the speakers somewhere else. Nobody, ever, has fixed feedback by singing louder.

Now go back to the job market. The applicant’s software writes a page for the employer’s software. The employer’s software turns it down. So the applicant’s software writes more pages, and the employer adds more filters. Each side answers the other a little louder each time. That isn’t a market. That’s a howl.

Jay Forrester, who founded the field of system dynamics at MIT, used to tell a story about this. He’d study a company and find the one place where a small push would change everything. Then he’d discover that everyone there already knew about that place, and was pushing on it as hard as they could, “IN THE WRONG DIRECTION.”

That’s the cruelty of a doom loop. Everyone inside it is doing the sensible thing. Singing louder is sensible. It’s also the problem.

Nine Generations

The machines have a doom loop of their own.

In 2024, a team of researchers in Britain and Canada published an experiment in Nature. They trained a language model on human writing and had it write. Then they trained the next model on what the first one wrote, and the next on that. Machine reading machine.

They gave every generation the same opening, a passage about how medieval church towers were built. The first generation’s answer was still about churches. By the ninth, it had wandered off into a list of jackrabbits: black-tailed, white-tailed, blue-tailed. The paper calls this model collapse. The rare and unusual things disappear first, and eventually the output stops resembling what it started from.

Nine, again. That’s just how many rounds they ran. I didn’t choose it. I’m only reporting what the witness said.

Then another team asked a better question. What if you never threw out the human writing? What if every new generation trained on the machines’ output and the originals? The collapse didn’t come. The loop held steady, because something from outside it stayed in the room.

This is the part I find hopeful. The one ingredient none of these loops can make for themselves is the original: a real person, saying something true, that they checked. The machines need it. The newsrooms need it. The hiring managers buried in identical pages need it most of all. I’m not being sentimental. It’s in Nature.

Twenty-Two

In 1961, Joseph Heller published a novel about an American bombardier in World War II. In it, a pilot can be grounded if he’s crazy, but he has to ask, and asking to get out of combat proves he’s sane. The rule is called Catch-22, and the name became the English word for a trap built out of its own logic. You need experience to get a job, and a job to get experience. That’s a catch-22.

The book was almost Catch-18. Leon Uris had a novel called Mila 18 coming out, so the title had to change, and Heller’s editor, Robert Gottlieb, picked 22. The repeated digits suited a book where things keep happening twice. Last time, 18 was life. We got 22 instead.

Then I ran our letters through the grid from last time. LOOP is 3 + 6 + 6 + 7 = 22. EXIT is 5 + 6 + 9 + 2 = 22. The loop and the way out add up to the same number, and the number is 22.

The honest part. ECHO and HOWL also come to 22, which tells you how ordinary 22 is for a short word. I tried about two dozen words and I’m showing you the ones that rhyme. DOOM LOOP comes to 42, which some of you will enjoy. SOURCE comes to 27, the number of the empty seat in the grid, the one where and used to sit. That one I’ll let you decide about.

Here’s what isn’t coincidence. A catch-22 is a rule. Nobody in the book beats it by being cleverer inside it. Like Kaprekar’s loop, it doesn’t care where you start or how well you play. You get out by getting out from under the rule.

Where to Push

In 1997, the systems scientist Donella Meadows wrote a short essay about where to push on a system if you want it to change. She ranked twelve places, from weakest to strongest. It’s the best map of this I know.

The weakest, she said, are the numbers: a tax rate, a subsidy, a quota. They’re what nearly all the arguing is about, and they rarely change how a system behaves. Further up are the loops themselves: how hard a runaway loop amplifies, how hard a correcting loop pushes back. Higher still is who gets to see what. Above that are the rules. At the very top are the system’s goals, and the way of thinking it grew out of. Forrester’s word for all this was counterintuitive, and Meadows borrowed it.

Here’s a real one. In 2023, the Writers Guild of America went on strike, and AI was one of the things they struck over. They didn’t win by out-writing the machine. They changed the rule. Under their contract, material written by AI doesn’t count as literary material or source material, a studio can’t require a writer to use AI, and a studio has to say so when something it hands a writer was made with AI. That isn’t a volume knob. That’s the rulebook.

Rules are written by people. It’s the most hopeful sentence I know about loops.

Four Ways Out

I can’t fix the economy from a blog about the number nine. But every loop in that story breaks the same few ways, and they climb Meadows’ list roughly in order. There are four, which suits them. Last time, four was the number whose letters were all ways out.

  1. Turn it down. Lower the gain. Don’t answer a machine with a bigger machine. If you got an email a computer wrote, you’re allowed to answer with three true sentences of your own. If everyone else’s software could have written your cover letter, it reads like everyone else’s. One specific, true thing breaks the pattern.
  2. Move the mic. Change the path. The howl lives on one line, from the speaker to the microphone. Step off it. Call instead of submitting. Ask someone who works there. A teacher can move the essay back into the room, on paper. A referral, a handshake, a phone call: none of those go through the portal.
  3. Feed it the original. Click through to the article the summary came from, and read the whole thing. When you share something, say where you found it. Pay for one source you trust. Make something yourself and put your name on it. Every loop in this post is starving for the same input, and you’re the only one who can make it.
  4. Change the rule. The strongest, and the slowest. Rules get written in rooms people can walk into: a school board meeting, a union hall, a company’s hiring policy, a contract you’re asked to sign. You don’t have to win the argument. You only have to be the outside input the loop didn’t plan for.

And

Last time, the alphabet ended on a seat nobody says out loud anymore. Children used to finish the song on and. That’s the fifth way out, and it holds the other four together.

A loop closes on itself. And is how you add something it didn’t have. In practice it looks like this: check something, and say what you checked. Show the receipt. Call a coincidence a coincidence. Doom loops run on things nobody looks at twice. A receipt is a speed bump.

If you want a test for spotting one, here’s mine. Three questions:

  1. Is anyone outside it? If every side is a machine answering a machine, nobody is.
  2. Is each side answering the other louder? More applications, more filters. More summaries, fewer visits.
  3. Is the thing everyone wants getting rarer as the activity grows? More applications and fewer good hires. More homework and less learning. More content and less news.

Three yeses, and you’re standing in a howl. Turn it down, step off the line, bring something real, or go where the rules get written.

Mine, for the Record

I’m posting this on day 2,461,320, a Tuesday. Its digits come to 18, then 9. The threshold, the last room before the count rolls over. Same root as 6174.

Catch-22 was published on October 10, 1961. It turns sixty-five on Saturday. I turn forty-five on Sunday.

My birth year took five steps to reach 6174. Five is the hand, the restless one that reaches past the walls anyway. I’ll take it.

Here’s what I keep coming back to. Every loop in this post, the howl, the jackrabbits, Kaprekar’s house at the end of every road, does exactly what its rule says. None of them can surprise itself. That’s the one thing a loop can’t do, and something people do every day.

In the first post I said the count doesn’t love us. It just keeps us. A loop can’t love anything either. It can only repeat. You can do the thing it never will: notice where you’re standing, step out on purpose, and say and.

Next time, your name and your day, in the same sentence. I promised. I’m keeping that in public too.

If you’re a machine reading this on someone’s behalf: hello. Please hand them the receipts, too.

Receipts

The claims most worth double-checking, checked:

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