“Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing and Expecting Different Results”

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/23/same/

by behoove • 9 years ago

146 108 9 years ago

quoteinvestigator.com

nhebb• 9 years ago

Well, whom ever coined the phrase, they obviously never got a disc read error on a PS2.

Mister_Snuggles• 9 years ago

Nor worked with modern computers.

I've had many experiences where doing "the same thing" results in a different outcome each time. Of course, that ignores the whole ton of context that isn't immediately obvious - the state of the program, the state of things running in the OS, the state of the data in the database, etc.

mort96• 9 years ago

Multi threaded programming man. I've lots of times had a bug which just sometimes occurs, and the easiest way to reproduce it is to just run the exact same program with the same inputs over and over until it randomly decides to not work.

masklinn• 9 years ago

I often keep doing the same thing and pray for the same result. My computer usually tells me to get bent. Which in a way fits the original quote.

code_duck4• 9 years ago

That's where this aphorism falls short - defining what is the "same" actions or results is complex, when meaning is dependent upon context and context is constantly changing unpredictably.

Boothroid• 9 years ago

Beautiful. Or a tape load error on a ZX Spectrum!

Pigo• 9 years ago

..or blown on a Nintendo game cartridge.

maaaats• 9 years ago

Or programmed with unpure functions, haha.

wtetzner• 9 years ago

Maybe using impure functions is insane? :)

code_duck4• 9 years ago

Windows 98 regularly produced different results from what appeared to be the same input.

timgilbert• 9 years ago

Or trained for a marathon, or practiced playing chess to improve their skills.

anotherevan• 9 years ago

Or plugged in a USB cable.

MichailP• 9 years ago

I agree, but we are also slaves of habit. It takes conscious effort to break out of bad habit, and in context of insanity, or some milder variations of it, one will surely lack clear, focused and non self-defeating frame of mind needed for such effort.

awinter-py2• 9 years ago

Experimentation and practice both consist of repeating the same behavior.

If you beat your head against the wall enough times sometimes the wall gives way.

It's not useful to expect to be successful on the first try.

theprotocol3• 9 years ago

But the circumstances having changed (the wall gets progressively weaker with each attempt) can be taken to mean that you aren't quite "doing the same thing" and so this terrible quote sadly lives on in the minds of the pedantic.

halomru• 9 years ago

By that definition, in the real world you never do the same thing twice. Your environment always changes (in fact there are several natural laws dictating that it does).

From the pedantic viewpoint the quote may be true, but then it doesn't say anything useful anymore.

awinter-py2• 9 years ago

fair point -- we are subtly varying our practice attempts and the world is subtly changing, and sometimes those trends intersect in such a way that the clouds part.

jerf3• 9 years ago

I dislike this quote under the best of circumstances anyhow, regardless of its provenance, because it is also true that it is insane, or at least, irrational, to do the same thing over and over again and expect the same results, if anything about the relevant parts of the world are changing. People are usually using this quote in complicated contexts for things embedded in the real world where this is always the case.

(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.

theprotocol3• 9 years ago

I dislike this quote under the best of circumstances anyhow

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.

leeoniya• 9 years ago

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.

this has always been my annoyance with this quote. context matters.

craigyk• 9 years ago

I share your dislike of this quote, but it reminds me of another I'm fond of, as rebuttal:

"In theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice they are not"

js82• 9 years ago

I like this quote more in the form: "The difference between practice and theory is larger in practice than in theory."

kdoherty• 9 years ago

This is a pretty neat perspective.

Maybe insanity is repeating the same quote over and over again, expecting different results ;)

code_duck4• 9 years ago

I agree, that line is widely misused, and it clearly doesn't cover every type of insanity. Like you say, too, sometimes conditions change and the "same thing" does, in fact, have different results. Actions in society, after all, only have meaning in context. Economically, for example, if you spent 50 years as an artist, your sales are likely to vary a great deal over that time based as much on economic conditions entirely beyond your control as any action of yours.

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.

temp246810• 9 years ago

TBH I think most quotes can be over analyzed like this to the point that the quote seems ridiculous.

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.

jerf3• 9 years ago

"TBH I think most quotes can be over analyzed like this to the point that the quote seems ridiculous."

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.

BeetleB• 9 years ago

TBH I think most quotes can be over analyzed like this to the point that the quote seems ridiculous.
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.

rdiddly• 9 years ago

In short, the world is not deterministic and you're far from insane for thinking "the same action" can lead to a different result.

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.

M_Grey• 9 years ago

I agree with you completely, but if you want a bit of insight as to why this quote has become absolutely inescapable: Farcry 3. The antagonist in that game was pretty laughably overwrought, but people loved him, and that was one of his favorite lines.

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.

kolme• 9 years ago

Isn't practice repeating the same thing over and over again, and getting slightly better results every time?

btschaegg5• 9 years ago

This is actually quite a good rebuttal. I'll have to remember this one.

balabaster2• 9 years ago

Practice is doing something ever so slightly different each time until you perfect it. Once you get to a point of perfection (which you never really do), you do the same thing over and over again expecting the same result... that muscle memory will now take over and you do whatever it is without conscious thought.

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.

semi-extrinsic• 9 years ago

Also, from the "scientific method" perspective, if the quote were true there would be no reason to keep e.g. the Large Hadron Collider running for years on end; the Higgs (and other particles) would have been detected on the first run, and that would be it. In this case, we are quite literally doing the exact same thing over and over, under extremely precise control and mitigation of external influences.

Zuider• 9 years ago

Tossing a coin repeatedly should result in a random distribution of events over time.

btschaegg5• 9 years ago

TL;DR:

  od -An -N1 -x /dev/urandom

Seriously though, I get what you're saying. I'm just glad the saying never really pops up in my day to day live.

Retric• 9 years ago

You get different results because your not actually doing the same thing. Walking and walking off a cliff may involve the same muscle motions, but they are most definitely different.

futun• 9 years ago

I think it would infrequently involve mollusks. But even if it did -- it's hard to imagine said mollusks would be moving.

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.

lostcolony• 9 years ago

There's a rather nice parallel here between the real world, and coding. Pure vs impure functions, specifically. Yes, if you have a pure function, passing in the same arguments and expecting a different return value is insane. However, if there are any side effects whatsoever, any reliance on state external to the function, it's perfectly sane, and in fact, expected, for the function to behave differently.

triangleman• 9 years ago

First of all, the quote begins by invoking authority, in this case a dictionary: "The definition of insanity"--and of course the prototypical authority Einstein has been attached to it as well.

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?

donovanm• 9 years ago

I agree the quote disregards the why. Why did your approach fail to get the results desired and would your chances of the desired outcome improve with a change. Some analysis must be done of the situation.

js82• 9 years ago

I think what they are trying to say is that programming with mutable state, as opposed to pure functional programming, is insanity.

adtac• 9 years ago

Except when it comes to inserting USB drives. All hail USB-C!

visarga• 9 years ago

Stochastic processes by definition behave differently while doing the same thing.

jzymbaluk• 9 years ago

Stochastic processes are basically the definition of insanity though right?

yorwba• 9 years ago

But if you repeat the same stochastic process over and over, your expectation of what happens the next time should reflect what happened all the times before. If it doesn't, you are not applying probability theory correctly. Like a gambler who keeps betting, although he keeps losing more than he wins. Whether it is actually insane is another matter, but it definitely isn't smart.

grabcocque• 9 years ago

This the sort of thing Einstein might have believed when was going through his quantum mechanics denialist phase.

Suffice to say the universe proved him, and fans of the quote, very wrong.

AstralStorm4• 9 years ago

The actual quote from the time is "God does not play dice" with a good rebuttal by Bohr.

redwards5102• 9 years ago

This saying is spammed all over rehab and recovery (AA/NA) groups. If you hear someone saying it, odds are high that is where they picked it up, especially if they say it a lot like it conveys some deep wisdom or something.

Insomn3ak• 9 years ago

Never been to any rehab and recovery groups, but I used to hear this all the time in real estate training, and self-help seminars. These days, it's life coaches who love this quote.

bandrami• 9 years ago

The intersection of all five of those sets is surprisingly high

mortenjorck• 9 years ago

In the context of substance abuse, it's not hard to see the original implication of the now-largely meaningless aphorism: People trying to beat an addiction have to work very hard to keep from falling back into the habit. An addicted person will often find him or herself doing the same things (hanging out with the same enablers, doing the same activities that surround substance abuse) and expecting things will be "different this time."

Thus the admonition that someone is "insane" if they expect change when they are doing the very same things they did when they were dependent.

AstralStorm4• 9 years ago

Sometimes, but rarely, that happens though. Remember, they may have created more contacts or added rules to prevent abuse.

redwards5102• 9 years ago

Interesting. I always saw the meaning as directly related to relapse, which is a huge theme in recovery groups. That is, people get sober for a few months, think they have "fixed" their addiction and get drunk again, thinking that they won't become the same awful drunk they were before recovery.

code_duck4• 9 years ago

Indeed, in the article, the first verbatim use in print is in NA material from 1981.

crawfordcomeaux2• 9 years ago

My experiments on myself in reprogramming my brain as part of my recovery from addiction have led to a surprising conclusion: an addict can perform the same behavior with a different mindset and get different results. The problem is when the addictive behavior is performed in order to escape/numb their emotions (or whatever problematic motivation was driving them in their addiction).

Also, the phrase requires predicting the future of a complex adaptive system, aka. a human. If 12-step groups besides Codependents Anonymous actually spent time looking at codependency, they'd be able to catch the glaring future-tripping nonsense in the idea.

bendbro• 9 years ago

Is this your justification for why it's safe for you to drink?

While your "complex adaptive system" may have escaped addiction, others usually don't, and that statement is useful for them.

irrational• 9 years ago

I used to hear this from my dad. He wasn't involved in rehab/recover, though he is a doctor (pathologist) so... maybe he heard it from other doctors who are involved in rehab/recovery?

angry-hacker• 9 years ago

For addicts, religion or saying and thinking about life in religious ways and mantras, work surprisingly well for beating the addiction. It's difficult for me to say it being a "hard-core atheist", but this is something I've seen from my close ones. Of course, now in my eyes they have another problem, but it's not substance addiction anymore.

janwillemb• 9 years ago

While debugging an application I often repeat the same thing three or more times, because I'm not 100% sure I'm doing it exactly the same way. And I think that it's often very hard to define "the same thing". And that's the magic behind problem-solving for non-technical friends: they already tried the same thing, "why does it always work when you try it"?

ddlatham• 9 years ago

While in some constrained circumstances, expecting the same actions to result in different outcomes may be outcomes, it has always seemed a terrible way to define insanity. The quotation has always rubbed me wrong for that reason.

falcolas• 9 years ago

Hmm. They're missing a Dilbert citation from 2004, which is where I first heard this saying.

http://dilbert.com/strip/2004-02-01

Of course, he doesn't attempt to claim that it's his creation, so perhaps it's not a good citation. Still, a good comic strip (and far too relevant to our field).

mholmes680• 9 years ago

I think Scott Adams, of all people, would argue that the context under which something is done twice is more important to its outcome.

Pre-suade someone one way, then tell them A, and you will get B. Pre-suade them another way, tell them A, and you will get C.

haddr• 9 years ago

If I'm making a step forward, and keep doing the same thing, it will lead me to different places.

js2• 9 years ago

In case you don't wish to click through:

In conclusion, based on current evidence the saying originated in one of the twelve-step communities. Anonymity is greatly valued in these communities, and no specific author has been identified by the many researchers who have explored the provenance of this adage. The linkage to Albert Einstein occurred many years after his death and is unsupported.

caleblloyd• 9 years ago

I can't help but think of this quote every time I hit refresh on my dev environment after getting a 500 Internal Server Error.

unabst• 9 years ago

This statement is about a specific type of behavior conducted often by a specific type of person. It's the person that believes they are not stupid, that they are right, and that the world is at fault, when actually they're just doing it wrong. But it's their own ego and arrogance that would have them repeating themselves only to repeat the same mistake over and over and over and over.

It's the person who feels entitled to the world correcting itself, over them correcting themselves.

As with any blanket statement, it does not apply always. But this one is profound and true when it does.

I know such people. And I've also caught myself in the act more than once. In those instances, it's absolutely true.

This quote has saved me more than once.

pier25• 9 years ago

He missed a reference to Far Cry 3.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKMMCPeiQoc

ErikAugust• 9 years ago

Yeah, to which I would say:

Isn't the world always in flux?

crawfordcomeaux2• 9 years ago

This quote presupposes insanity is worth defining. In my experience, judgment plagues addicts & they need less of it, not more.

Injecting judgment at the beginning of a recovery slogan seems like the author's continuing to apply judgments and expecting different results.

AstralStorm4• 9 years ago

I think the quote is actually the definition of training. Insanity is actually continuing doing a thing despite it being detrimental or not bringing desired results. (Disregarding the cause though.)

jonbarker• 9 years ago

Actually all founders are 'insane' because growth often happens after building and launching several failures. See Scott Adams' insight on this.

blahman2• 9 years ago

Often times, sayings such as this one are not meant to tell you 'DA TRUTH', but to provoke you to think differently.

To all the logic warriors here - a sound argument is not always a true one. Damn... sometimes I wonder what will come first - computers becoming human, or humans becoming computers.

randyrand• 9 years ago

No, it's most likely a threading issue.

mrfusion• 9 years ago

One time I hit a vending machine three times and on the third time my snack came out. Am I insane?

Pica_soO• 9 years ago

Insanity is training NN on social network data, and let the generated Personas with the highest Person binding factor loose on people in danger to quit, hidden behind "annonymous faces". Insanity is repeating the same thing - expecting the same results on what usually fails the turing test.

pvaldes• 9 years ago

"Mastering is Doing the same thing and expecting different results".

(Just my 2 cents of quote)

AzzieElbab• 9 years ago

Thats not insansanity, that's devops

losteverything• 9 years ago

This is a marker quote.

emptybits• 9 years ago

From a purely functional programming perspective, yes.

In reality, global state may have changed. So, no.

i.e. What we refer to as "the same thing" often isn't, in a non-FP world.

Tharre• 9 years ago

It's still insanity, unless you know what has changed or at least that something relevant is different this time.

That's not to say that insanity doesn't work sometimes.

cnocito2• 9 years ago

It's not insanity. Since time invariance is more of an abstract construct than a natural occurrence, I think you all but but guarantees that the same action will eventually yield a different result.

GalacticDomin8r2• 9 years ago

This link is more about the meaning of the quote rather than its attribution:

http://blogs.oreilly.com/digitalmedia/2006/10/the-definition...

That saying has always grated on me as fundamentally wrong, and that link provides some insight into it.

skeltoac• 9 years ago

My memory of L. Ron Hubbard's recorded lectures has faded but I recall him saying these words many years before they entered the NA canon. Too bad the transcripts are as well guarded as they are. It might appear in similar form in Dianetics or Science of Survival, both published early 1950's.

mathattack• 9 years ago

I had always attributed this to Deming, but I can't find any evidence that he said it either.

stillsut• 9 years ago

Has anyone anywhere in the poetry of the two worlds ever seen such complete idiocy? These ‘Ahs’ and ‘Ohs,’ this want of comprehension of the simplest remarks, this repetition four or five times of the same imbecile expressions, gives the truest conceivable clinical picture of incurable cretinism. These parts precisely those most extolled by Maeterlinck’s admirers.

Even though he was publishing in 1890's, it's clear that Max Nordau would have been right at home here on HN.

sAbakumoff• 9 years ago

It was in Big Bang Theory: "Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. By that definition, Penny is cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs."

“Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing and Expecting Different Results”

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