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.world 15 hours 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?
oxomoxo@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Actions are absolutely repeatable to a level of precision enough to achieve a desired goal. Hence your ability to type this comment, for musicians to perform music, for athletes to win games, so on and so forth. Repeatable actions are at the center of humanities ability to function.
All actions have variance, but the level of accuracy is only relevant to the prescribed goal. In the example of a basketball, the ball only needs to enter the top of the hoop from a given range of angles, at a range of speeds. As long as you are within this tolerance you will achieve the goal of making a basket. The whole concept of the game relies on this repeatability.
When a person learns to write they must draw a series of shapes. At first the letters are often difficult to read and will make the words they attempt to write unintelligible. As they practice, they refine their motor skills to within a tolerance of legibility. Each letter doesn’t have to be truly identical. Just within the tolerance of the goal.
So the key points here are; tolerance of repeatability is defined by the goal, repeatable actions are ingrained in nearly everything we do, and finally if you think that repeating your position through a series of pedantic semantics, goal post shifting or false premises is going to change the outcome of this argument, that might just be the definition of insanity.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Now we are getting to the point: You are saying that an action doesn’t have to be identical to be the same. There can be variance.
Now, let’s say this is the case. Look at a random professional basketball game. If it’s as repeatable as you say and the whole concept of the game relies on this repeatability (so without that repeatability there is no game of basketball), then that means every single shot will go into the basket. Otherwise it’s not as repeatable as you claim. Is that true?
If this repeatability is so simple and easy to make, why would anyone need to practice for it? Do you think that pro basketball players just show up for the games and never practice?
Now the cool and fancy but inapplicable terms arrive, when the real arguments disappear.
If you want to, I can supply some other non-fitting terms as well: Selection bias, survivorship bias, stockholm syndrome, strawman argument. Happy now? Throwing non-fitting fallacy names out doesn’t make you look smarter.
Lightor@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I teach MMA. I specialize in BJJ. When I’m showing someone a technique, I show them the proper way. They then do the move, and most times they get 90% of it right but have to keep working on that last %10. If they just practice that over and over at %90 it’ll never be good. They need someone there correcting it, until they perfect it. Once you perfect it, you expect the same outcome over and over from the same thing. That is muscle memory.