There’s a specific thing I refer to as “really trying.” This is probably misleading of me, because to some degree it’s a learned skill: people can definitely intend to try at something, and have the experience of trying at it, and never for a moment do the thing I’m going to call Really Trying. At the same time, though, I think it’s an important concept, and noticing when people are and aren’t doing it can give you some important information about their values.

The way I usually explain this is: Really Trying is the thing you do when you really want a goddamn coke.

Have you ever just really, really had a craving for a coke? (Or insert your food or beverage of choice here – I don’t even actually like coke.) You go to get a coke from the fridge, but then you notice you’re out of chilled cans. Fine, you’ll get a room-temperature coke and pour it over ice. Those are above the fridge, and you usually get your roommate to take them down because you’re short, but your roommate is out of town. You don’t have a stepstool. You try standing on a phonebook, which you still have around in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty one for some reason, but that’s not enough. An overturned wastebasket would be perfect, but it won’t take your weight. You think about physics for a second and then go get the wastebaskets from all the rooms in the house, turn them over, arrange them, and then put a two-by-four across them to stand on and distribute your weight.

The box of coke cans in the cupboard is empty. Why the hell can’t Monica ever throw them away when she takes out the last one.

You take everything out of the fridge to make sure you didn’t miss a coke can somewhere, to no avail. So then you decide to go to the store. It’s three miles and you don’t have a car but you can walk three miles, it’s fine. You put on your good walking shoes and fill a water bottle and stuff a few dollars in your pocket and you walk to the store. You’re kind of drenched in sweat by the time you get there but you really want that goddamn coke.

The store only carries pepsi.

The next closest store is too far to walk. There’s a bus line but you didn’t bring your bus pass. But you have your phone, so you download the app and buy another bus pass, and ride a succession of three buses to a store which turns out to be expecting their shipment of coke tomorrow.

Fine. You take two more buses home and then you order a fucking pizza just to get some coke. The pizza place calls you to tell you they don’t carry coke anymore, would you like a Dr. Pepper, and you offer to tip the driver $50 if they will swing by a gas station and bring you a goddamn coke.

They bring you a coke. It’s in a glass bottle. You don’t have a bottle opener.

You watch a couple of youtube videos and try opening it with a few household items, but you just can’t make it work. So you get out a bowl, and you smash the bottle into it, and you strain the coke through a couple of coffee filters to get out the glass shards, and then you drink your goddamn coke.

That’s what really trying to get a coke looks like.

Now: obviously there are degrees here! You can genuinely try to get a coke and still only care so much about it. It is, in fact, objectively silly to really try this hard to get a coke. But when it’s something genuinely important, it’s not so silly.

Even when it is something genuinely important, not everyone is going to be able to try all of those things. You might not be able to walk three miles, or the bus app might only work on iphone and you have an android, or you might not be able to afford to tip $50 for a coke. That doesn’t mean you’re not Really Trying, that just means your resources are limited.

But there’s still a particular kind of Trying, present in the coke example, which I want to gesture at.

You’re not just doing the motions of Try To Get A Coke. If part of your job description included giving people cokes when they asked for them, and someone asked you for a coke, you would probably look in the fridge, notice you didn’t have a stepstool, conclude you’d fulfilled your responsibilities, and tell the customer that you were out of coke. No one would blame you for that! You did all the things you could reasonably be expected to do! But it’s not what you do if you’re really trying to get a coke.

Another (less silly) example is that the rationalist community is generally committed to Really Trying about death. People generally try not to die, and even to prevent other people from dying! But they don’t generally really try. Really Trying about death looks like actually sitting down and thinking for five minutes by the clock about whether there’s anything you can do. It looks like researching charities and making spreadsheets about how many lives they save per dollar. It looks like the desperate Hail Mary throw of cryonics. It looks like anti-aging research, and saving hard drives full of information about yourself in case of rescue sims, and debating whether it’s worth wearing bike helmets in cars.

There are a lot of reasons that people fail to Really Try. I think the most common one is probably something like learned helplessness. Most people really don’t want to die, but there’s a lot of cultural learned helplessness about death (“two things are inevitable – death and taxes”). And this is reasonable enough! For most people, throughout most of history, there’s been a pretty hard limit on what they could do to avoid death. Even for smaller things, it’s easy to have too much learned helplessness to Really Try. I suspect the school system teaches a lot of this. Not only does it rarely reward Really Trying, it often punishes it; if you Really Try on an assignment, you’re likely to get marked down for not doing it the way the teacher intended.

It’s also important to keep in mind that it’s easy to see someone Really Trying with limited resources, and assume they’re not Really Trying. “Resources” here is a broad term: it can mean time and money, but it can also mean skill at outside-the-box thinking, executive function, or spare weirdness points to spend. Really Trying uses up a lot of all of those things. (Which brings us to another point – no one can Really Try at everything all the time, or even at most things most of the time. It really has to be reserved for a few top priorities, while you do a normal reasonable as-much-as-can-be-expected amount of trying at other things.)

Still, observing what things people Really Try at can give you information about their priorities. And this is even more true of organizations, since you can reasonably be less concerned about whether you’re claiming they don’t “really care” about something when they’re just short on resources or have learned helplessness about it – you’re not going to hurt the organization’s feelings, it’s reasonable to just care about the outcomes.

In particular, it’s useful to think about interventions which aren’t standard and expected, but are fairly easy to think of and not too costly in various resources. A person or organization who isn’t trying any of those interventions is more likely to not be Really Trying at the goal in question, and that tells you something about how much they genuinely care about it. (Again, with the caveat that you might be missing ways in which the intervention is more costly than you think!)

For instance, a programming company which is just following standard expectations will offer some disability accommodations to its employees: an elevator for people who can’t climb stairs, accessible bathrooms, medical leave, etc. A programming company which is really trying to recruit the best programmers regardless of their disabilities will do other things, too. Maybe they’ll ask new hires if they want a chair, a sitting ball, or a standing desk at the same time as they ask if they want a Mac or PC. Maybe they’ll have flexible work-from-home policies, or a room stocked with different mice and keyboards for people who have trouble with the standard ones. There’s a limit to how many resources they’ll expend, obviously – they’re trying to make money – but if they’re really trying to get the best people, they won’t just do the normal things.

This can be a painful and unflattering check to apply to myself. Am I just going through the motions of trying to resolve a conflict with someone – am I just doing enough that I can shrug and say to onlookers “well, I did everything I could, it’s not my fault” – or am I really trying? Did I really try to do that task, or did I try just enough that I could reasonably say “I can’t, you do it instead” and pass it off to someone else? (Be careful, of course, if you’re prone to scrupulosity. You cannot, and should not attempt to, Really Try at everything in your life. Think about a handful of specific things that are very important to you, and Really Try at those.)