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.
I feel like you’re purposefully arguing in bad faith. Are you legitimately trying to convince me that “the same thing” means “not really the same thing”? Regardless of how you meant to ask the question I believe most people, in this thread at least, have a very different sense of what the original quote meant. Your responses throughout the thread feels like trolling.
It’s impossible to do the identical thing twice. Try it. Try to throw a ball absolutely identically twice. That’s not possible. Each time the ball will end up flying slightly different. So obviously “doing the same thing over and over again” cannot mean “doing an identical action over and over again”.
Because that would be equivalent to “the definition of insanity is performing an impossible action”. That’s nonsensical.
Thus “the same thing” must refer to that the overarching action is the same, not that every detail is identical. And that’s what you do when you practice: You e.g. play the same song on the same instrument over and over again. Crappy at first, proficient in the end.
Repeat a task in a way that if you’d describe the task with a few words you would use the same words for both tasks. E.g. “Throw a baseball at the target”.
It’s physically impossible to identically repeat any action. If you e.g. throw a ball twice, no matter how hard you try, neither your movement nor the travel of the ball will be identical. Even someone with perfect ball throwing skills will e.g. not be able to hit the same exact spot on a target with sub-nanometer accuracy. So it would be kinda pointless to claim that “do the same thing multiple times” means “do an absolutely identical string of absolute identical actions multiple times”.
So obviously it’s a bit more bird’s eye view: If you throw a ball twice at the same target, you have done the same thing twice. Even if you don’t manage to hit exactly the same spot and your motion wasn’t exactly identical.
You’re arguing that human error doesn’t allow for the same results which I agree with. But if you want to achieve the goal of being better at something through practice, you have to rely on more than just hoping that by chance, your error will achieve a better result than the last time you tried. That does not contribute towards learning to be better at a task. You must make conscious decisions to correct mistakes. If said decision changes something you did last time, I wouldn’t call that “doing the same thing”.
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.
You are doing the same thing (playing the same piece of music on the same flute). You aren’t doing an identical thing.
You don’t think the context of the quote is implying doing the same exact thing repeatedly?
No, it says “the same thing”, not “the identical action” or even “the same thing exactly the same way”.
If you are practising something, are you not doing the same thing (“practising X”) no matter whether you are good or bad at it?
Do you call it differently, depending on your skill level?
I feel like you’re purposefully arguing in bad faith. Are you legitimately trying to convince me that “the same thing” means “not really the same thing”? Regardless of how you meant to ask the question I believe most people, in this thread at least, have a very different sense of what the original quote meant. Your responses throughout the thread feels like trolling.
It’s impossible to do the identical thing twice. Try it. Try to throw a ball absolutely identically twice. That’s not possible. Each time the ball will end up flying slightly different. So obviously “doing the same thing over and over again” cannot mean “doing an identical action over and over again”.
Because that would be equivalent to “the definition of insanity is performing an impossible action”. That’s nonsensical.
Thus “the same thing” must refer to that the overarching action is the same, not that every detail is identical. And that’s what you do when you practice: You e.g. play the same song on the same instrument over and over again. Crappy at first, proficient in the end.
How do you define the phrase “the same thing”?
Repeat a task in a way that if you’d describe the task with a few words you would use the same words for both tasks. E.g. “Throw a baseball at the target”.
It’s physically impossible to identically repeat any action. If you e.g. throw a ball twice, no matter how hard you try, neither your movement nor the travel of the ball will be identical. Even someone with perfect ball throwing skills will e.g. not be able to hit the same exact spot on a target with sub-nanometer accuracy. So it would be kinda pointless to claim that “do the same thing multiple times” means “do an absolutely identical string of absolute identical actions multiple times”.
So obviously it’s a bit more bird’s eye view: If you throw a ball twice at the same target, you have done the same thing twice. Even if you don’t manage to hit exactly the same spot and your motion wasn’t exactly identical.
You’re arguing that human error doesn’t allow for the same results which I agree with. But if you want to achieve the goal of being better at something through practice, you have to rely on more than just hoping that by chance, your error will achieve a better result than the last time you tried. That does not contribute towards learning to be better at a task. You must make conscious decisions to correct mistakes. If said decision changes something you did last time, I wouldn’t call that “doing the same thing”.
“practicing” is spelled with a ‘c’
Oh, another American who hasn’t heard of British English!
TIL, forget it