5 Reasons Einstein’s Definition of Insanity is the Definition of Insane.

• Reason #1: Einstein didn’t say it. Though the quote is often attributed to him (and sometimes Mark Twain or Benjamin Franklin), there is no recorded evidence of Einstein himself ever having made this remark. In fact, the earliest documented instance of it being used is allegedly in a 1981 Narcotics Anonymous pamphlet. It also appears unequivocally a few years later in the 1983 mystery novel Sudden Death by Rita Mae Brown: [“Unfortunately, Susan didn’t remember what Jane Fulton once said. ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.’”] How it spread from there and came to be pinned on Einstein is anybody’s guess.

• Reason #2: Even if Einstein had said it, he would have been laughed at as the biggest scientific hypocrite of his time. On the contrary, more than anyone, Einstein should know that the due methodology of science demands and relies upon the rigor of repeated experimentation, expecting results to change through replicating a large number of identical trials around a set of initial conditions. Those are the rules of the game, after all.

• Reason #3: Even if Einstein had believed it, he would have had more to beef with on quantum mechanics than in his famous (correctly-attributed) quote: “God does not play dice.” To elaborate, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics infers that our universe is probabilistic, rather than deterministic in nature. For example, the Law of Large Numbers (LLN) states that through enough repeated trials, over time the results will converge to a stable average. In other words, if you toss a coin 10 times, you might get an average of 80% heads and 20% tails, but after flipping it a million times, the average evens out to ~50/50. De facto, this indicates how doing the same thing over and over can predict a consistent result. Insane, right? What’s more, the Law of Truly Large Numbers expresses how when tossing a coin a million times, you are also more likely to experience highly improbable outcomes, such as getting heads 150 times consecutively, than in a sample set of just 150 flips. You might actually go insane trying that experiment. But it does demonstrate that eventually, novel outcomes will arise from many repeated attempts. So, if God plays dice, surely God expects there to be different results.

• Reason #4: “Practice makes perfect.” If you have ever tried to learn a new skill, like picking up an instrument, or taking a course in archery, you know that practice itself, an activity involving constant repetition, is a necessary factor for growth and achieving results. In other words, doing the same thing over and over is exactly how you should hope to achieve an outcome that diverges from what you got on your first few tries. Hence, this definition of insanity amounts to something like, “practice makes psycho.” Well, touché to that!

• Reason #5: In spite of these reasons, people keep repeating this quote, as if they expect it to hit differently than the last time it was said, and frankly that drives me bonkers! Y’all are definitively maniacs!😭