Take that (not) Einstein!

  • squaresinger@lemmy.worldOP
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    1 day ago

    No matter whether you are awful or great, if you are practising skateboard tricks it’s called “practising skateboard tricks”. Because you are doing the same thing. You aren’t doing identical actions while practising skateboard tricks, but you are doing the same overall task.

    • oxomoxo@lemmy.world
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      11 hours ago

      Imagine you are practicing basketball free throws. The goal of the practice is to get the ball through the hoop.

      To be clear the key word is goal, which can be defined as an achievable end result. In this example the ball goes through the hoop or it doesn’t.

      If you throw the ball away from the hoop in such a way that it doesn’t even come close to going through the hoop, a reasonable person would say you need to change your actions to get a different result.

      However, if you do not change your actions yet you expect the ball to go through the hoop, this is unreasonable and could broadly be seen as “insanity” as a sort of pejorative for a person who may be suffering from mental illness or is simply being unreasonable.

      Practice by definition is synonymous with iteration, which is repeating an activity while making changes to affect the result or outcome of that activity.

      The statement is about the individual goal not the general activity you’re practicing.

      • squaresinger@lemmy.worldOP
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        8 minutes ago

        Identical actions are impossible to do. No matter how great you are at throwing a basket ball, the ball will never hit exactly the same spot even if you allow for full nanometers of tolerance (and even then it wouldn’t be identical).

        So if your definition of “doing the same thing” is to do each repetition absolutely identical, then the whole statement is an impossibility, and then we don’t need to talk about this at all, because it’s already impossible to “do the same thing” multiple times.

        If you allow for variance though, your whole argument doesn’t work anymore.

        So what do you want to go with?