
“Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing and Expecting Different Results” - behoove
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/23/same/
======
emptybits
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
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.

~~~
cnocito
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.

~~~
contravariant
If you expect things to turn out differently you will often be disappointed
though.

~~~
cnocito
That's a function of your expectations. People get sad when they don't win the
lotto but they don't celebrate every day they don't get hit by a car. It's not
the odds, it's the expectations that are off.

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redwards510
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.

~~~
mortenjorck
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.

~~~
redwards510
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.

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

~~~
Mister_Snuggles
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
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.

~~~
jdironman
I wonder if it comes down to humans actually believing they can control what
is basically an electric signal for its life time, if that makes sense.

01001101 01100001 01111001 01100010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000
01100001 01110100 00100111 01110011 00100000 01101001 01101110 01110011
01100001 01101110 01100101

~~~
LeonB
I decoded this by pasting it into
[http://www.roubaixinteractive.com/PlayGround/Binary_Conversi...](http://www.roubaixinteractive.com/PlayGround/Binary_Conversion/Binary_To_Text.asp)
(I won't spoil the answer)

~~~
BoorishBears
I'd expect someone who went through the trouble of decoding it to share the
meaning but maybe that's insane.

------
grabcocque
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.

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

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awinter-py
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.

~~~
theprotocol
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
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.

~~~
bowlich
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and
he's not the same man.”

― Heraclitus

(I thought this quote was Xeno, but the internet says I'm wrong)

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js2
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._

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

~~~
jzymbaluk
Stochastic processes are basically the definition of insanity though right?

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

[http://dilbert.com/strip/2004-02-01](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
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.

------
janwillemb
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"?

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AstralStorm
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.)

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

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

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jerf
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.

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

~~~
balabaster
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.

~~~
AstralStorm
Depends. Doing the exact same thing may make you faster at performance. Up to
a limit of course.

Or it may cause mistakes elsewhere. Determinism of this kind is for children.

~~~
spencerflem
Doesn't doing something faster count as slightly different?

~~~
balabaster
This is what I was thinking, but I didn't pursue the argument because
"determinism is for children" struck me as an ad hominem argument and I have
better things to do than argue with that.

------
caleblloyd
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.

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

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unabst
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.

------
crawfordcomeaux
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.

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MichailP
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.

------
ddlatham
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.

------
stillsut
> _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.

------
pier25
He missed a reference to Far Cry 3.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKMMCPeiQoc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKMMCPeiQoc)

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GalacticDomin8r
This link is more about the meaning of the quote rather than its attribution:

[http://blogs.oreilly.com/digitalmedia/2006/10/the-
definition...](http://blogs.oreilly.com/digitalmedia/2006/10/the-definition-
of-insanity-is.html)

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

------
randyrand
No, it's most likely a threading issue.

------
skeltoac
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.

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Pica_soO
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.

------
sAbakumoff
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."

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

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AzzieElbab
Thats not insansanity, that's devops

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

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

(Just my 2 cents of quote)

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blahman2
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.

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ErikAugust
Yeah, to which I would say:

Isn't the world always in flux?

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losteverything
This is a marker quote.

