Frazz by Jef Mallett for May 08, 2019

…and often remembered by neither side…

Truth is, when you practice, you don’t keep on doing exactly the same thing. Otherwise, it would be insane…

Insanity is doing the same thing and trying to get different results.

Practice is doing the same thing, but trying to do it differently.

History is a showcase. What do we put in it?

Depends on what you’re doing

Practice is teaching your body and brain how to do it right automatically.

Isn’t that a fact Caulfield. In Canada, if you are of British heritage, you won a war, French, you lost a war and if First Nation, if your history was factually written, it would be in blood.

Seems to me, there is a fine line that separates Caulfield’s two ifs, which suggests they are not the same but similar. Frazz’s comment shows the separation, while Caulfield’s closer sounds tangential.

The first ‘if’ is a debunked internet meme that refuses to die; while the second is a flawed definition of practice. (Practice is doing something over and over to try to get better at it, not to try to get a different result.)

Actually it’s the winners melt all the losers coins.

By contrast, in politics, the losers are in charge of the future.

Do the same thing and experiment with the newly discovered variable and see how the results change.

Not true in the least. When you practice, if you get a result you don’t like, you make adjustments and do it differently next time. If you are doing it right, then you are trying to get the same result each time. The goal of practice is to keep doing something until the results that you want are obtained as often as possible.

So either you are doing it to get the same result or you are doing it differently to get a different result or you are not doing practice right.

Ho hum! ‘Nuff said..

You “Learn” to do something the right way. You “Practice” so that you will do something the right way without thinking.

Yogi Berra said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”

how about the vietnam war?

probably talking about ancient historical wars

Actually, if you practice, you get different results…

The concept of practice is to find the right way of doing something and then to repeat it with the goal being to obtain the same correct result. If you didn’t get the correct result, then QED, you didn’t do it the same.

I keep reading this comic strip and expecting something funny, not the same joke stretched over three days.

Not really getting what the “philosophical” or “humor” points are in these last few days. Practice may be insanity in some ways…. but again it may not.

Non-human animals do not seem to regularly engage in what we would technically call “practice”. The wolf doesn’t simulate hunting a rabbit to improve its time like runners do….. the wolf simply tries again and again to get the rabbit so it can eat.

There are of course a few exceptions to my comment….. wolf pups play fight, and play chase each other…. puppies do this too…. and kittens as well. But…. for the most part, I do not see many headband wearing gazelles going out for a daily five mile jog just for the hell of it. :)

Caulfield is not exactly stating the truth – Mallett is stating an assumption to come up with a pretty lame punch line. Kind of a stretch to define insanity and practice as expecting different results. As noted before, practice is the act of doing something in order to expect the same result every time.

Not quite sure how the aphorism about history being written by the winners fits with the set-up. In any case, it’s false: the history of the Civil War was largely (re)written by Southerners, generally thought to have been the losers in a lost cause. A very smart friend of my mother’s, a Kentuckian, said that she didn’t find out that the South lost the Civil War until she went away to college. (But she may have been joking, as she had a taste for irony.)

As a coach I gotta say “please get off this theme.” Practice is doing things slightly differently to get a better result, and then learning to be consistent to produce the desired result under high pressure circumstances, all while being aware enough to recognize which slight variations are worth learning to replicate and which habits are deleterious to overall performance. Athletes practice to improve, not to remain the same.

Blog Post Frazz15 hrs ·

Of course, you all knew the difference between practice and insanity from the start. Or several differences and variations on the theme. And then there’s the reality that it’s perfectly possible, even reasonable, for the two to coexist. Practice makes perfect, and we’ve all met a few people who are perfectly nuts.

History is written by the winners, and that goes double for oral histories