# On Being Robust

In­spired in part by Be­ing a Ro­bust Agent. Flip­side of Half-ass­ing it with ev­ery­thing you’ve got.

Do you ever feel… fake? Like, at any minute, Scooby Doo and the gang might roll up and un­mask you as a freeload­ing fraud im­pos­tor in front of ev­ery­one?

There are a lot of things to say about the im­pos­tor syn­drome on a psy­cholog­i­cal ba­sis (the fears are of­ten un­re­al­is­tic /​ un­mer­ited, etc). But I’d like to take an­other an­gle. For a few years, I’ve tried to just make a habit of be­ing un-un­mask­able. Although this is a use­ful frame for me, your mileage may vary.

My point isn’t go­ing to just be “do the things you know you should”. I think we’re of­ten bad at judg­ing when cor­ners are okay to cut, so you prob­a­bly do bet­ter just by hav­ing the policy of not cut­ting cor­ners, un­less it’s ex­tremely ob­vi­ously alright to do so. That is, gen­er­ally err against us­ing scis­sors when con­fronted with cor­ners, even if it makes sense in the mo­ment.

# Con­crete examples

• Mak­ing in­sights truly a part of you. This doesn’t mean one should freak out about the Math Gestapo check­ing whether you’ve mem­o­rized what Jor­dan nor­mal form is. Rather… when I was just be­gin­ning to learn for­mal proof-based math, I wor­ried “I’m about to go work with some of the smartest peo­ple in the world, and they’ll in­stantly see I’m a fake who just picked up shal­low knowl­edge”. The in­ter­nal re­sponse was “just get good enough that in no con­ceiv­able world could you be a fake who se­cretly can’t do for­mal math”.

• Work­ing out reg­u­larly, tak­ing care of the small things, build­ing the key good habits. Hav­ing your shit to­gether.

• Learn­ing a lot of re­lated ar­eas, just in case they have key in­sights.

• Reg­u­larly and au­to­mat­i­cally back­ing up your files, in mul­ti­ple lo­ca­tions.

• Us­ing a pass­word man­ager to gen­er­ate and store strong pass­words, au­to­mat­i­cally sync­ing your database over Drop­box, etc.

• Rather than hav­ing em­bar­rass­ing things on Face­book which you hope peo­ple won’t find, just use a tool to search-and-delete in­crim­i­nat­ing cringey ma­te­rial from your past.

• Keep your ex­haus­tive re­sume up-to-date, us­ing a slick tem­plate like you know you should.

• Fol­low­ing best prac­tices (e.g. when writ­ing code, so there isn’t a se­cret layer of gross code un­der­neath the most promi­nent func­tions; when deal­ing with git re­pos, so fu­ture col­lab­o­ra­tion /​ merg­ing works out okay).

• Re­spond­ing to emails af­ter read­ing them. Not leav­ing peo­ple on read by mis­take (I’m bad at this, ac­tu­ally).

• Us­ing spel­lcheck on your doc­u­ments.[1]

• Schedul­ing meet­ings and show­ing up on time by leav­ing a lot ear­lier. Avoid­ing the plan­ning fal­lacy. Set­ting mul­ti­ple alarms be­fore flights.

• Hav­ing enough slack.

# The gen­eral philosophy

This ro­bust­ness is a kind of epistemic hu­mil­ity—it’s the kind of rea­son­ing that ro­bustly avoids the plan­ning fal­lacy, only gen­er­al­ized. It’s the kind of rea­son­ing that dou­ble-checks an­swers be­fore turn­ing in the test. It’s best prac­tices, but for your own life.

I try to live my men­tal life such that, if peo­ple could read my thoughts, they would think I’m do­ing things right. That doesn’t mean I’m always be­ing po­lite to peo­ple in my mind, but it means that I’m not be­ing de­ceit­ful, or un­fair, or se­cretly cut­ting cor­ners on work I’m do­ing for them.[2]

Again, the point isn’t “have good habits and be happy”. The point is that I think we of­ten cut too many cor­ners, and so I recom­mend a policy which leans to­wards not cut­ting cor­ners (even when it lo­cally makes sense). The benefits for me have been twofold: get­ting bet­ter re­sults, and feel­ing more se­cure about my­self while get­ting those re­sults.

1. Iron­i­cally, the first draft of this spel­led “im­pos­tor” as “im­poster”. ↩︎

2. Nat­u­rally, I prob­a­bly fail any­ways some­times, be­cause I’m some­what bi­ased /​ un­able to achieve full trans­parency for my thoughts. ↩︎

• Hmm, this all roughly makes sense, but I feel like there was some kind of im­por­tant gen­er­a­tor here that you were aiming to con­vey that I didn’t get.

I think you should prob­a­bly do most of these things, but not sure which or­der to do them in, and mean­while, I think so long as you’re afraid of be­ing un­masked part of the prob­lem seems like it’s about the fear it­self?

• I think the im­por­tant gen­er­a­tor is: be­ing ro­bust seems like a solu­tion to this “gen­er­al­ized plan­ning fal­lacy”[1], where you don’t cor­rectly an­ti­ci­pate which cor­ners should not be cut. So, even though you could the­o­ret­i­cally ex­cise some wasted mo­tions by cut­ting pointless cor­ners, you can’t tell which cor­ners are pointless. There­fore, a bet­ter policy is just not cut­ting cor­ners by de­fault.

I think you should prob­a­bly do most of these things, but not sure which or­der to do them in,

TBC, the main point isn’t that peo­ple should do these spe­cific things per se, the main thing is the over­all mind­set.

and mean­while, I think so long as you’re afraid of be­ing un­masked part of the prob­lem seems like it’s about the fear it­self?

This is what I was get­ting at with

There are a lot of things to say about the im­pos­tor syn­drome on a psy­cholog­i­cal ba­sis (the fears are of­ten un­re­al­is­tic /​ un­mer­ited, etc). But I’d like to take an­other an­gle.

I think the fear it­self is the key prob­lem with im­pos­tor syn­drome, and I wasn’t try­ing to say “just be so good you feel se­cure” should be the main line of at­tack on that in­se­cu­rity.

1. I don’t par­tic­u­larly like this name, but it’s just a tem­po­rary han­dle. In the plan­ning fal­lacy, you op­ti­misti­cally stress-test your planned sched­ule. In this case, you op­ti­misti­cally stress-test your life in a broader sense; be­ing ro­bust at­tempts to counter that. ↩︎

• I think the im­por­tant gen­er­a­tor is: be­ing ro­bust seems like a solu­tion to this “gen­er­al­ized plan­ning fal­lacy”[1], where you don’t cor­rectly an­ti­ci­pate which cor­ners should not be cut. So, even though you could the­o­ret­i­cally ex­cise some wasted mo­tions by cut­ting pointless cor­ners, you can’t tell which cor­ners are pointless. There­fore, a bet­ter policy is just not cut­ting cor­ners by de­fault.

Ah, that does make the point much clearer, thanks!

• Awe­some. I should also note this gen­er­a­tor is post hoc; I was (try­ing to) do this for a few years be­fore I was even think­ing about the plan­ning fal­lacy.

• This re­flect both a cou­ple of com­ments I’ve made re­gard­ing rules ver­sus an­a­lyz­ing/​op­ti­miz­ing as well as very un­clear thought I’ve had bounc­ing around in my head for a lit­tle while now. The though is about the ten­dency of dis­cus­sion here be­ing very for­mal and model ori­ented, as if we re­ally can op­ti­mize in our daily lives like oc­curs in the the­o­ret­i­cal world of our minds and equa­tions and prob­a­bil­ities. I’m not say­ing that ap­proach is some­thing to avoid, only that it does tent to set the fo­cus on a view of pre­ci­sion that prob­a­bly does not ob­tain for most in a ma­jor­ity of situ­a­tions. (The re­cent post about act­ing on in­tu­itions rather than the calcu­la­tions, then track­ing those over a year or two to see what you learn fits here too.)

This rule ap­proach clearly takes that ev­ery case de­ci­sion anal­y­sis choice away, if one buys into fol­low­ing the rule. How­ever, we all know that in some cases you can get away with vi­o­lat­ing the rule (and per­haps even should vi­o­late the rule—or re­vise as has been sug­gested in other threads/​com­ments as I re­call). At the same time if can be difficult, as you men­tion, to know just which cases are good for vi­o­lat­ing the gen­eral rule. I would add that it might not be enough to keep track of when we vi­o­late the rule and what the re­sults were—the prob­a­bly hangs on just how rep­re­sen­ta­tive the in­di­vi­d­ual cases are and how well we can tell the differ­ences in any truly com­plex case.

This seems all very para­dox­i­cal to me, and gen­er­ally I can deal with para­dox and a con­tra­dic­tory world (or per­haps just in my own be­hav­ior when I try view­ing it from an out­side per­spec­tive). Still, I find my­self want­ing to wrap my own think­ing around the situ­a­tion be bit bet­ter as I read var­i­ous ap­proaches or thoughts by peo­ple here.

• This seems like an­other an­gle on “Play in Hard Mode”. Is that about right?

• Yeah, I think that’s quite close to this con­cept—thanks for the link.
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