Yeah, no. You should be adjusting each cycle when you practice, until you start getting the desired results.
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2025
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It depends on what you are practicing. If it involves things out of your control, for instance poker, you definitely shouldn't adjust after every result. In the poker case that leads to not playing well just because you lost one time.
Even in less random things you have to be absolutely sure you found the problem before adjusting.
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No.
You're either doing the thing right, and expecting the same result, or you're doing it wrong and then adjusting. Either way, you're not doing the same thing and expecting a different result.
If you’re expecting the same result (and getting a different result) you’re doing scientific research.
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If you're practicing the exact same way over and over you're doing something wrong.
You must not be a bowler.
That's not always true. Finding the optimal way to do something is only one potential aspect of practice. Another is getting to a level where you can do it consistently and on demand, over and over and over, without missing a beat.
And even once you've reached that level, that skill can be lost or degrade over time if you dont keep at it, so repeatedly performing the same motions in the exact same way becomes pretty much necessary in order to maintain your skill level.
If you were looking for consistency, that is by definition you looking for the same result, which is not covered in the definition of insanity.
Oops. I appreciate you clearing up the confusion. You ever just feel like a big dumb idiot sometimes? Cause I sure do.
I do feel like that sometimes, so completely understandable.
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Finding? How are you going to find it? Since you're arguing to never change what you're doing in practice the very first attempt at practice must be the thing you always repeat right?
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No. Practice isn't doing the same thing over and over again.
Practice is an iterative process where each time you fail, you learn something new and add it to the process until eventually you find a result that is different.
You're practicing your golf swing because you keep shanking the ball to the right. You don't keep making the same shot over and over agin. You adjust your stance. You adjust your leg positioning. You adjust a hundred little things until you find the combination that gives you the results you want. THAT'S Practice...not just repeating the same action.
When I get a movement right, I keep repeating it over and over until it's committed to memory. You're saying I could've stopped at the first success? Why did no one tell me earlier?
But do you expect different results when doing that? I think the point of that would be to get the same result every time.
Nah. Some forms of practice like shooting or bowling or anything where the goal is to do something 10 or 100 times and get a high score are absolutely about doing exactly the same thing over and over again as predictably as possible and the variance of result is the problem.
If you don't like that example, how about chess puzzles?
Certainly between practice sessions you might wisely expose yourself to new ideas, but the idea is the same:
See a position, see the winning strategy / tactic / idea. If you're a student of the woodpecker method, once you do that once, you do it again, exactly the same way, and hope to be faster at it.
These are forms of practice wherein you do the same thing, exactly the same way, and hope to get increasingly better results by honing a skill through repetition without changing anything. its not that you CANT change things sometimes or that you shouldn't, but generally speaking the idea is consistency.
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Anyone else kind of hate this "definition"? I've been hearing that shit my entire life, and I just can't help but roll my eyes every time.
It's terrible, wrong, and out of context. Einstein was talking about quantum mechanics not mental health. He really didn't like that at the quantum level results are random but follow a very spefic probability curve.
He thought quantum mechanics would be able to achive classical physics like results. Where the only uncertainty was because of measurement error.
quantum uncertainty is the most experimentaly proven theory in physics. So even in the context Einstein made the statement he was wrong.
Einstein wasn't talking about anything at all, since it's a misattribution. Einstein never said that. Someone just stuck Einstein's name in front of their own stupid garbage quote to make it sound smarter.
"Einstein wasn't talking about anything at all, since it's a misattribution. Einstein never said that. Someone just stuck Einstein's name in front of their own stupid garbage quote to make it sound smarter." - Einstein, 2025
"That's exactly how to do that!" - Gandalf
Putting aside the fact that you cannot "experimentally prove" anything as proof is for mathematics, claiming you can experimentally demonstrate fundamental uncertainty is, to put it bluntly, incoherent. Uncertainty is a negative, it is a statement that there is no underlying cause for something. You cannot empirically demonstrate the absence of an unknown cause.
If you believe in fundamental uncertainty, it would be appropriate to argue in favor of this using something like the principle of parsimony, pointing out the fact that we have no evidence for an underlying cause so we shouldn't believe in one. Claiming that you have "proven" there is no underlying cause is backwards logic. It is like saying you have proven there is no god as opposed to simply saying you lack belief in one. Whatever "proof" you come up with to rule out a particular god, someone could change the definition of that god to get around your "proof."
Einstein, of course, was fully aware of such arguments and acknowledged such a possibility that there may be no cause, but he put forwards his own arguments as to why it leads to logical absurdities to treat the randomness of quantum mechanics as fundamental; it's not merely a problem of randomness, but he showed with a thought experiment involving atomic decay that it forces you to have to reject the very existence of a perspective-independent reality.
There is no academic consensus on how to address Einstein's arguments, and so to claim he's been "proven wrong" is quite a wild claim to make.
"[W]hat is proved by impossibility proofs is lack of imagination." (John Bell)
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Idk about that...
When you practice something, you're actively changing your technique to elicit better results. You're not making huge changes, but rather a series of miniscule ones that add up.
For instance, I could sit down with a flute and a piece of music, and play it decently. It wouldn't be great, but it wouldn't be terrible. If I play it the same way every time, it's always going to sound decent - but it's always going to have the same wrong notes, the same rushed passages, the same intonation issues... If I practice it, I can make changes over time that fix those things. I can fix my fingerings, even out the rushed bits, adjust my intonation... But then I wouldn't be doing the same thing anymore, I'd be doing something slightly different.
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Did Einstein actually say that? Even if he did, he wasn't a psychologist. Plus, scientists recreate experiments all the time, literally doing as close to the same thing as possible and often getting different results.
So No. I also was always very irritated by this quote, because from a scientific point of view this is rather incorrect, as (like you said) experiments need to be repeated, to verify the results.
No, Einstein did not say that. But it's often misattributed to him, that's why I put it as "(not) Einstein".
Gotcha, thanks!
"If at first you don't succeed, give up and blame the Jews"
watch that get downvoted
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"The same". In a literal sense. Not figuratively like in practice, where you're repeating things to aim for better performance/outcomes. Every repeat is different, or at least should be otherwise there is this great qoute... something about repeating the same thing and expecting different results....
Oh doing something over and over and over again cause you want to get the diminishing returns milked for all its worth is absolutely insane.
It just also happens to be useful insanity.
Its what pushes humanity at its fringes is the insane going for more and trying to get the little they can. Most of the "sane" people arent much worth talking about.
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We have (at least) two fundamentally different types of knowledge—there’s our intuitive world model that does improve with repetition learning (much like a neural network) and does change with practice; and there’s rule-based knowledge that improves by eliminating possible rules/theories via observation.
My interpretation of Einstein’s quip is that insanity consists in confusing the two—thinking that rule-based knowledge can improve by performing the same tests over and over until the results match our theories, instead of modifying our theories to reflect the results.
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A idiotic comments trying to argue that its different, dont understand that the AIM stays the same. And yes after each iteration you get closer with practice.
The execution might look a bit different but the aim is still at the exact same after each iteration.
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Q. How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
A. You get on a plane
What? No it's not when you practice you expect to get better... The results vary greatly.
Also one would practice a variety of things that are completely different from each other not the same thing over and over.
Also Albert Einstein never said that the first recorded use of the phrases is in the 1980s.
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The difference is that when one is practicing something one knows that "the result" can be achieved or improved.
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