Diogenes
DP Veteran
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If the problem is actually identical. Often problems that are thought to be identical, because they share several high level issues, but they are not in detail; then a solution that worked before may not work in the new application or vice versa.
Here is one from engineering: Standard solution "Work with convention when cooling an electronics rack with fans, i.e. blow from bottom to top." Wrong! If a piece of printer paper falls to the floor and slides over to my cabinet design it gets sucked up blocking the air intake, cooling failure. But some people would just say its the papers fault.
But you could keep trying to blow from bottom to top, hoping for a different result. This sometimes happens when people misdiagnose a problem and think it is different this time when it really isn't. After all, some people still believe in Keynesian economics.