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The Definition of Insanity
Yes, I do own a mirror, why do you ask?
Wisecracks aside, these are some thoughts about the old cliche “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing expecting different results.” I once asked a psychology professor how his profession actually defines insanity. He says they don’t use that word, preferring more specific descriptions of mental illness. In that sense, the cliche is not well formulated enough to even be wrong. But even if the psych boys don’t use the word in a formal context you, me, and he know roughly what I mean when I say it so we’ll roll with it.
Right away that old firebrand Heraclitus pokes his head in to ask “What do you mean you’re doing the same thing?” Heraclitus was the ancient Greek geek who famously said “You can’t step into the same river twice.” Here he might have a point. Whatever thing you’re doing, iterating it in time changes the parameters at least a little bit. A man might wake up every morning with the premonition that “Today is the day I will die”. More often than not he’s going to be wrong about that. And yet though he lives eighty, ninety years eventually he’ll get that question right.
A little more broadly than that, it’s worth considering whether it’s the same thing after all. I spent about a decade troubleshooting industrial machines. One of the first steps in any problem is “do it again, and see if it happens again.” Aside from all the times the machine started working as mysteriously as it stopped (a frequent and gratifying occurrence) doing the same thing again gives you the chance to watch what’s going on and see if you can figure out why.
Right this moment I’ve got a lawnmower battery on the charger. It’s blinking red at me. Pull the battery off the charger, reseat it. Now it’s blinking green, which ought to mean it’s charging. It will blink green for a while, but it’ll be back to red sooner or later. It takes a couple minutes though. Checking … yup, it’s blinking red again. Time to reseat the battery again.
On the one level yeah, definition of insanity, it isn’t likely to suddenly start working this time. On another level maybe it will; maybe scraping the contacts this time will clean them such that a good connection is being made. Maybe thinking about the battery will allow me to divine something of the inner logic of the charger — how does it know to blink red or green? — that might tell me what I’m doing wrong with what’s ostensibly a binary choice. Maybe it’s charging in the first bit, and by manipulating it over and over again I’ll be able to finish mowing my lawn. Maybe the whole thing will annoy me enough to go back to John Menard and demand a refund.
That last point is worth dwelling on. Even if the circumstances don’t change, people do. If you see someone run full tilt into a brick wall, odds are he didn’t realize it was there. If you see him run into it twice, then he’s got a reason for it. It might be a stupid reason (the latest TikTok challenge), it might be an understandable reason (drug dealers holding his wife at gunpoint making him act stupid for their own amusement), or indeed it might be insanity in the literal sense. Though that last seems rare. I’ve met plenty of neurotics (speaking unscientifically) but very few who were psychotic enough to actively and purposely hurt themselves.
If we extend the question to metaphorical brick walls we find much the same categories. The teenager who’s rebelling in the old predictable ways will get himself into trouble because he can’t see the brick wall that’s so evident to those of us who have already hit it. A man might do all kinds of stupid things either because he’s wanting to communicate something to those who are watching, or because he’s acting off of information that we as observers don’t have.
The trouble is when you’re stuck riding along. This is the most frequent context in which I hear this cliche; that the political party or the company management or whomever is acting insane. It’s one thing to slam yourself into a brick wall for reasons you deem sufficient. It’s quite another to be slammed for reasons that bloke over there fancies. Reasons he hasn’t adequately explained to you. Sometimes he has those reasons, and if he had stopped to explain them properly to you you’d agree the wall was necessary. But sometimes he’s just an idiot.
Hanlon’s razor advises us to never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. (And let’s be honest; the word “insanity” in the cliche is really a slightly nicer way of saying “idiocy”. Nobody thinks a fly buzzing against a window is crazy, just of insectile intelligence.) That’s good, but it’s only part of the puzzle. It’s dangerous to attribute to stupidity that which is best explained by malice. Absent either, actions may appear stupid because the actor is operating off of information you don’t have, or off of beliefs that you don’t share. It’s unwise to judge decisions too harshly when you don’t and can’t know all the facts. That said stupidity and malice are never too far from any human decision.
One last thing to discuss before I go, and that’s the guy who’s creating his own problems. Let’s say, hypothetically, you’ve got a person who lets his lawn grow too long because he doesn’t want to mow, and so when he finally drags himself out there to mow the grass is thick and long and it takes three times the effort. You’d think he could save himself trouble by forcing himself out there regularly to mow while it’s still shorter, but somehow he keeps running into the same problem over and over again. Definition of insanity. How do you help someone like that?
Heck if I know. Best I’ve figured out so far is to let him keep hitting that brick wall until either the wall gives or he does. Because the truth of the matter is that we all do this, to some extent or another. Hitting that brick wall comes after a calculation; will I endure less pain doing this or in going around? Don’t think that going around is free; the guy’s got his reasons for avoiding that option even if they’re stupid reasons. Hopefully he’ll decide that he’s being stupid, that he’d rather take the other option after all. In the meantime, he’ll keep engaging in behavior that, to the rest of us, looks insane.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for today. I’ve got to go reseat the battery on the charger again.
Published in General
I did like the Jonah Goldberg line, “Another word for doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, is practice.”
It could be worse, at least this hypothetical guy recognizes that he’s responsible for the problem as opposed to some unseen malignant forces (not that I doubt their malignancy, but I don’t believe they’re out to get this guy specifically).
Make sure you let it cool down completely before attempting a recharge. I have some 40v Greenworks batteries that are fussy about that– maybe more so than they used to be.
The problem is your commie battery powered equipment. If you were using good old coal-fired steam power you wouldn’t be having this problem.
I check into the PIT everyday looking for intelligent conversation. Talk about insanity!
It blinks differently if the battery is at the wrong temperature to charge. You get a green blink if it’s charging, and a steady green light if it’s at full charge. If it isn’t charging you get a red blink. If it isn’t charging because it’s at the wrong temperature you get a short red blink followed by a long red blink, repeated. I’m not great at Morse code, but I think that spells out “AAAAAAAAA”.
“Doing the same thing” in English never means performing literally the same action. It always means “performing an action that is an instance of the same class of action.” A class of action is identified by specified values of specified key attributes. Not by specified values of every attribute.
I mean, I am certain that there are persistent malignant forces out to ruin me, but at least I’m pretty sure it isn’t a conspiracy. If they were conspiring they’d pretty much have to invite the most consistent and malicious antagonist; me.
You sure about that? Pretty much every time I’ve heard someone cite this cliche the implication was that the actions taken were the same in all essentials.
By “key” attributes I mean “essential” or “identifying” attributes: the set of attributes whose values that identify a specific action as being a member or not a member of the same class . So I think we are saying the same thing.
Here is an illustrative example of the cliche.
Every time John goes fishing he clicks two sticks together the whole time to attract fish to his line, but he never catches any fish.
You tease him, “Doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity!”
You have formed a class of action in your mind, and John’s actions are always instances of that class.
There are an unlimited number of possible attributes of an action that you could be thinking of that determine whether of not an action is of this class (the “same” class). In a given case of using the cliche, however, none but a very small number are relevant to the one you actually have in mind. For example, if John goes fishing twice, once on a Tuesday and once on a Thursday, and clicks two sticks together the whole time to attract fish to his line on both occasions, you would call this, “doing the same thing” even though one of the attributes of his actions (“day of the week of the action”) would different.
“Day of the week of the action” is a non-identifying attribute of the class you have created. The Boolean attribute “actor clicks two sticks together the whole time to attract fish to his line” is an (the only) identifying attribute. If, and only if, the value is True of two different times John goes fishing, then you would say “John did the SAME thing both times.”
So… what’s your point?
I mean I can understand the class/instance based model you’re describing, but I don’t see what light it sheds on the discussion. Are you trying to say it’s possible to misidentify the key attributes of a class and thus erroneously conflate different actions as the same thing? Or that the unknown information and motivations I discussed in the opening post must be considered part of the set of key attributes?
When you say, “John, right now you are doing the same thing you have done every time we have ever gone fishing!” do you mean…
(a) the set A of all observable attributes {a[1], a[2], … a[n] }
or
(b) only some specific subset B = {b[1], b[2], b[3]…b[n]}of A
…of John’s observable actions is “the same” every time?
Obviously, you have mentally selected some particular subset, B, of the observable attributes that identify the last time he performed an action as being “the same” as the other times. With regard to the values of infinitely many other variables that can be observed about his actions, each action is different.
The question Q1 can be restated this this way:
In other words, “Am I saying that you could accidentally mentally include attributes that you did not mean to, or accidentally mentally omit attributes that you meant to include?”
Since you are the only one who decides what thought you are expressing, whatever you think you meant is unquestionably what you did mean.
So, no. It is impossible for a human being ever to be wrong about what assertion he meant to express, for example with the term “doing the same thing”.
No. In fact, no one can ever tell you (or anyone else) what you mean (what set of attributes constitute the determining facts) by “doing the same thing”. Or by anything else that you or anyone else says.
Only you know what you meant by a term. That is the universal relationship between language and meaning. The meaning of a term or sentence is exclusively determined by the speaker or writer.
This is not generally known, even amongst Ricocheteers.
I think I understand what you’re saying and heartily agree with it. That is scary. What have I done to deserve such a fate?
First off, sorry for the late reply. I stepped away from the internet for a few days. That said, Mr. Camp, I think upon examining you’ll find you’ve misnumbered my questions. The first one is
Which answer I confess still eludes me.
That’s incorrect. The meaning of a term is determined by an implicit negotiation between the speaker and the hearer. Otherwise we’d all speaking our own unintelligible languages. The difference between what’s meant and what the raw words convey still exists of course, but when the man in the suit gets up and tells us all that the State of the Union is Strong, if what he means by those words is too far from what we understand by them that’s not our fault for failing to track his shifting meaning; he’s lying.
Oh, and for anyone still wondering about the lawn mower charger, it seems like it’s working. I’ve been able to get a decent amount of mowing out of the battery. My current theory is that the blinking red light means specifically that it’s stopped charging without knowing why, and that it’s failing to recognize a full charge.
[B] implies that when a person writes, before anyone has read the writing, he does not mean anything. But he does know what he means. It follows that [B] is false.
We need to agree on the answer to this first question that you raise (“is [A] true and [B] false, or vice versa”) before we can proceed to your other points.