No. Try not. Do… or do not. There is no try.
A green guy
~ Some Green Dude
That’s solid advice right there. You shouldn’t try to do this. Just do it. Or don’t, if you decide it you don’t want to for whatever reason.
Another movie had a similar philosophy: “You either karate or you do not karate. Karate so so. You beat up.”
Here’s the thing though, that advice is absolute bollocks. We live in a probabilistic universe – even if you do do instead of try, you are at the mercy of probability.
Our actions are stochastic, so are the actions of others. Even the basic physical forces acting on things are … stochastic. Ever studied the development of robots? Most of it goes into dealing with probabilistic actions in a probabilistic universe.
Most of the time when we “do instead of try” we aren’t even dealing with just ourselves, there are many moving pieces. People even. With their own stochastic thoughts and decisions.
Whenever you decide to do what you’re really doing is something more like: “Okay, I will do everything within reason to achieve this. If more information reveals it isn’t worth the effort, I won’t. If something more important comes up, I won’t.”
Sure, commit yourself fully, but remember you’re only trying and hoping for the best.
Related articles
- All Of Statistics: Part I (wmbriggs.com)
- Stochastic Pattern Recognition Dramatically Outperforms Conventional Techniques (technologyreview.com)
- Reverend Bayes, meet Countess Lovelace: Probabilistic Programming for Machine Learning (channel9.msdn.com)
- Active Learning and Contextual Bandits (machinedlearnings.com)
