Editorials & Other Articles

usonian

(23,433 posts)

5. I strongy disagree on that quote, but I have posted a ton on the party slugs. I will post in this thread shortly.

Wed Dec 31, 2025, 08:07 PM

Wednesday

And propose a less "Catchy" but more real statement at the end.
Spoiler alert:
You might be foolhardy if you repeatedly try the same thing, when it's statistically and physically very close to impossible, and quite often what was impossible is taken for granted now.

This has very solid backing from smarter people than myself.

I so hate that overused and outright wrong "definition of insanity".

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=19643403

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/einstein-wrong-truly-insane-do-same-thing-expect-results-andrews

Bradley Andrews

President at Worley

Published Aug 3, 2016

We’ve all seen it. Einstein’s famous quote “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." It’s used in business and societal circles all the time. In fact, you probably know someone who has it pinned up above their desk or is using it as a signature tag on their email. At first glance you can see the quote’s appeal; it’s short, catchy and has a famous author (although while Einstein is widely attributed of the quote, there is no evidence that he ever used it).

It’s used so much that is it has taken on a nearly dogma like status; but does it really hold true? I imagine if Albert did indeed say it, he was probably referring to the Scientific Method, where through experimentation you have constants you control tightly, and then adjust variables to understand causality and ramifications. In a closed and tightly controlled experiment it would be a poor use of ones time to continue do the same thing over and over again expecting a different outcome. But in the world of business nothing is ever a closed system; so do we truly take the time to understand the variables in our “experiment” before we change the controllable? There are many cases where it is perfectly reasonable to expect different results from re-trying a failed approach as conditions change.

One remarkable example is British Airways Flight 9 from London to New Zealand, which lost power in all four engines as a result of flying through a volcanic ash cloud from an eruption of Mount Galunggung. It’s an incredible story of the pilots staying calm and strategizing through the various survival options. For them, in the end, sticking to the engine restart process, failing time and time again while expecting and hoping for a different result, actually worked. The engines eventually restarted and they were able to land safely.

———— Commentary on this ———

YOU DON’T NEED QUANTUM MECHANICS, with its uncertainty principle and observer effects, though they are the way the world works at microscopic level, and everything “real” is built from those parts.

A batter will swing repeatedly at fastballs (or curve balls, or change-ups) and not get the same result each time. You can argue that no two pitches are exactly the same. WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD. Nothing is ever the same twice. That happens only in mental experiments.

In the real world, you can do the same thing over and over and get different results every time, because nothing is the same twice. Water falling on a rock may eventually create a bowl, or channel. Only things with a near-zero probability are not worth trying repeatedly, and yet, people play long odds at the lottery, and someone always wins if lotteries are rolled over.

Playing long odds is not insane. It may be foolhardy, or it may be genius.

Dynamic systems are often chaotic. A gentle change, applied repeatedly, may cause a “tipping point” in a system. I learned this at an early age, when my Dad ran for public office. He won a City Council seat after repeated failures, because every attempt changed the game. He gained greater recognition and respect.

So even WITHOUT quantum mechanics, Ted Williams failed to hit 60% of the time because he couldn’t estimate the momentum and position of a baseball, and his .400 plus average is legendary. Heisenberg didn’t coach him.
 A catcher can’t influence the trajectory and velocity of a pitch, despite signals and mitt placement. Neils Bohr wasn’t behind the plate.

_____________

Einstein's Parable of Quantum Insanity

Einstein refused to believe in the inherent unpredictability of the world. Is the subatomic world insane, or just subtle?

By Frank Wilczek, Quanta Magazine on September 23, 2015

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/einstein-s-parable-of-quantum-insanity/

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here).

( https://www.quantamagazine.org/einsteins-parable-of-quantum-insanity-20150910/ )

First of all, note that what Einstein describes as insanity is, according to quantum theory, the way the world actually works. In quantum mechanics you can do the same thing many times and get different results. Indeed, that is the premise underlying great high-energy particle colliders. In those colliders, physicists bash together the same particles in precisely the same way, trillions upon trillions of times. Are they all insane to do so? It would seem they are not, since they have garnered a stupendous variety of results.

Of course Einstein, famously, did not believe in the inherent unpredictability of the world, saying “God does not play dice.” Yet in playing dice, we act out Einstein Insanity: We do the same thing over and over — namely, roll the dice — and we correctly anticipate different results. Is it really insane to play dice? If so, it’s a very common form of madness!

We can evade the diagnosis by arguing that in practice one never throws the dice in precisely the same way. Very small changes in the initial conditions can alter the results. The underlying idea here is that in situations where we can’t predict precisely what’s going to happen next, it’s because there are aspects of the current situation that we haven’t taken into account. Similar pleas of ignorance can defend many other applications of probability from the accusation of Einstein Insanity to which they are all exposed. If we did have full access to reality, according to this argument, the results of our actions would never be in doubt.

In classical mechanics:

To know the state of a system of particles, one must know not only their positions, but also their velocities and their masses. Armed with that information, classical mechanics predicts the system’s future evolution completely. Classical mechanics, given its broader concept of physical reality, is the very model of Einstein Sanity.

—-

But we don’t in the real world. Only in mental models and physics exams.

I'll close this post by saying: You might be foolhardy if you repeatedly try the same thing, when it's statistically and physically very close to impossible, and quite often what was impossible is taken for granted now.

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