I came here to post the same sentiment. The form I dislike most is "The definition of insanity is..." because it further compounds the fallacy by reinforcing the unearned appearance of rigorousness.
It really is a specious quote.
So no, it's not quite doing the same thing over and over again. If that were the case, you'd suck just as much after 10,000 hours as you did at the start and be far more frustrated because you expected to get better, but you were doing the same wrong things with every iteration.
Or it may cause mistakes elsewhere. Determinism of this kind is for children.
So the quote is trying to "nail down" insanity rather than irrationality which is a much more challenging task. And you have to admit that there is a certain unchanging sameness that accompanies a typically insane person, who refuses to update his understanding of reality, his strategy of action, in response to external feedback. Thus, you tend to get the same sorts of actions repeatedly from insane people. For instance, a person who compulsively washes his hands might expect to achieve health or some other tangible benefit, when the fact is that by and large he is just wasting his time.
By invoking the quote, one is able to root out insanity in himself and others by finding examples of unchanging behavior which is often connected to an unchanging viewpoint.
Your complaint seems to be that this bit of wisdom misses the failure of people to update their world views, but 1) that is exactly what the quote tries to do, and 2) your examples of "same thing"/"same results" are tangential to the point of this quote. Sure, we need a proverb to encourage people to update their worldviews, even when things are working for them, but we don't need a proverb that covers all the bases. Might I suggest "The only constant is change", another wonderfully misattributed quote?
There's another part of it that's bothersome to me though - it's the "Insanity is..." part. It implies there's no other definition, cause or characteristic of insanity other than the one that's a-comin' later in the sentence. Here it comes everybody, THE definition of insanity: "Insanity is... blablabla." Oh THAT'S what insanity is, huh? Okay yeah, I mistakenly thought it might've been some kind of nuanced complicated thing psychiatry has been trying hard to understand. Good news, psychiatrists! We finally know what "insanity is!"
And now that I write that, I find myself thinking, is "insanity" even a valid concept? And ignoring that question, is insanity really that bad? Sanity doesn't seem to be all it's cracked up to be. I think they just talked me into doing drugs.
This quote, though, I like: "From the standpoint of the psychology of personal constructs we may define a disorder as any personal construction which is used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation." It seems like the broader, common quote could have been derived from that, imprecisely, losing most useful meaning in the process.
"In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice they are not"
this has always been my annoyance with this quote. context matters.
But let's give you the benefit of the doubt and assume for a moment that tidal forces below the cliffs were strong enough to dislodge the anchors of a few otherwise stationary shellfish, I don't think said motions would represent an act of defiance.
ps: I am not in possession of anything called a "not actually", so I don't believe it could possibly be doing the "same thing". Or anything for that matter.
The truth is that beyond the linguistics of the matter, it's just a wrong definition anyway. Insanity is defined by an inability to distinguish reality from fantasy, but that's too arcane a concept for most people to grasp it seems.
od -An -N1 -x /dev/urandom
IMO quotes are just ways to remind you of lessons learned; you take them at face value and move on.
A literary analysis of quotes seems out of scope of day to day life.
Of course this doesn't mean you shouldn't analyze things, but this quote does have an obvious face value meaning that is..well valuable.
But I think this one is special that way, which is why I call it out. It is not "sane" to do the same thing over and over and expect the same results, either. The implicit dichotomy the English creates is simply false.
I'm actually rather big into "wisdom", to a degree that the average HN reader would probably find rather quaint and old-fashioned. This is not a wise saying. The "kernel" in its center is not true. The truth that it sorta-kinda points out is not in its center.
Politically, it is difficult to convince people of the oncoming disaster of guaranteed-benefit entitlement programs, because they've worked up to this point so why can't we just keep doing the same thing and expecting the same result? But if you've got changing ratios of number of people on the programs vs. the number of people supporting them, you can't expect the same results to obtain.
You can't expect to just keep using the same antibiotics over and over indefinitely and getting the same results.
As we creep closer and closer to the possibility of being able to recreate extinct species and re-introduce them back into their original ecosystems, there's an interesting debate occurring about whether that's even a good idea. Once a species is removed from a niche, is it possible the ecosystem rearranges itself such that reintroduction would be a net negative? (This gets into its own tricky issues about how one can actually define "net positive result to an ecosystem" which so far we've been able to sort of skirt around with various heuristics, but with this sort of power becomes an unavoidable issue.)
In your personal life, there's really quite a bit that over the span of decades you can't expect to keep doing the same thing and getting the same result. Getting drunk and staying out all night doesn't have the same result at 22 as it does at 52. Exercise programs have to change. Careers have to change. Children change everything. Your own political opinions will have to change (is it really sane for a 55-year-old to have the same opinions about everything that they did at 15? what a weird world that would have to be). Your financial practices will probably have to change.
Change is the only constant in life.
If you are saying that every time I practice, I get a little better, then this is in accord with repeating consistent results.
Edit:
(except of course you generalize the result to "the coin falls down").
I think most of the examples one could give can be mitigated by rewording your expectations. Which, incidentally, is the reason for the quote in the first place.
It's like complaining that a metaphor isn't literal.
So basically, whenever I read the phrase so far (luckily, I never had to hear it in a personal discussion yet), someone uses it to belittle someone else without taking his/her perspective into account. Or any changes to the world as a whole for that matter.
>IMO quotes are just ways to remind you of lessons learned; you take them at face value and move on.
If that were how they're used, I'd agree. But a lot of people will "misapply" the quote, as well as present it as fact. The reason GP felt compelled to complain about it is that this is one of those quotes that is often presented as fact when it isn't.
Also, people often say these things as an excuse not to go in depth or justify their stance. When discussing an issue, they provide this as a reason. One of the most common examples is "Well, where there's smoke there's fire". This one really bothers me as it's almost always wrong whenever it is invoked (i.e. allegations were usually false). Not only that, the literal statement is plain wrong.
(If you're about to leap up and start going on about the scientific method, bear in mind that the difficulty in doing this properly and the rather extreme efforts that must often be undertaken to conduct the "same" experiment precisely because it is not a thing that happens automatically is itself testimony to how correct I am here, not a contradiction.)
There's a distortion introduced by English here which implicitly draws a dichotomy between "doing the same thing" and "doing the different thing" as if this is drawn from a set of two possibilities, but in fact there's a whole universe of possibilities of which "the thing you just did" is a tiny particular point. Both these formulations are actually correct because if you are doing a thing that is failing and has failed several times, there is quite likely no particular reason to believe that the world around you is going to change in the probably-very-precise way necessary to make it work. But as the world changes, the "same" thing you've been doing is also likely to go out of date because over time, it isn't the same thing. You may be performing the same action, but the context has shifted and the world is no longer what it was back when your action worked.
Anyhow, I just avoid the saying entirely. It is very rarely usefully applicable.