Radical Moderation and the Robustness Principle
"Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others."
I was scrolling through the Heterodox Academy blog the other day and ran across a great article by Michael Muthukrishna (who has a new book out that I will be buying) that immediately set my Radical Moderation antennae tingling.
While the whole article is worth reading, I really liked his discussion of the robustness principle, which I (weirdly) had not run across before. Here’s the brief summary from the blog post:
We can create a culture of psychological safety by encouraging in interpersonal interactions what’s called the robustness principle (Postel’s Law) in software engineering: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. In programming this refers to, for example, outputting well-formatted files but robustly accepting poorly formatted files from other programs. Don’t create files with missing sections or stray semicolons, but be able to read them if they have these mistakes. In communication it means being generous to others’ intentions – ‘steel-manning’ rather than ‘straw-manning’ their position – but personally making an effort to communicate clearly. A steel man argument attempts to make the best version of someone else’s argument, perhaps even better than they made themselves. Steel-manning is the strategy for people who see arguments as a means of together arriving at the truth rather than sparring to win for the sake of winning. Straw-manning is the opposite, taking the weakest version of an argument and arguing against it with the goal of winning rather than learning.
He goes on to make an argument for why free speech is important, which I also agree with, but the main thing I want to focus on is this specific robustness principle of being conservative in what you do but liberal in what you accept from others.
The more I think about it, the more I think that this is a pretty powerful rule for almost every aspect of life. It’s a very very old principle of virtue, found when Aristotle discusses magnanimity as well as when Jesus asks us “How can you say to your brother, 'Let me remove that splinter from your eye,' while the wooden beam is in your eye?”
This principle is powerful for a lot of different reasons, but the mechanics are what interest me right now. Why does this principle of expecting more than you expect from others create robust programs, societies, and human beings?
It encourages objectivity: By being very careful about our own behavior while giving others the benefit of the doubt, we undermine the fundamental attribution error, which I’ve discussed before. We have a lot of self-serving biases and the robustness principle turns them on their head and helps create a more objective relationship between self and the world.
It provides internal course corrections: By being more conservative about the messages we send but being liberal with other people’s, we help mitigate communication errors, which are a major reason human relationships fall off the rails. Many miscommunications are the result of being sloppy in our own messaging but expecting perfect comprehension (or even telepathy) from those who receive it. If, instead, we assume that other people will get our messages while they’re busy or distracted or drunk or whatever and craft our communications thoughtfully, we’ll reduce a lot of the friction that human life holds. On the flip side, reading messages from others through a good faith lens helps prevent misunderstandings, such as those where we read someone’s email as more aggressive than we should or the all caps of our internet-newbie uncle as a call to arms.
It helps us focus on what we can control: The call to be careful with our actions but forgiving of others isn’t just the standard for most major religions, it’s also a good reminder for our general sanity. If we focus too much on other people’s failings, we’re spending a lot of time and energy on things we actually cannot control at all. Conversely, when we spend time focused on what we can actually control - namely our own actions and responses to other - we reclaim control and agency in a complex and chaotic world. And that’s worth a lot right there.
Finally, the robustness principle intersects with many of the Big Eight principles of radical moderation, including complexity, humility, social individualism, humans matter, toleration, and optimism.
The robustness principle reminds us that human life is complicated, that we need to be humble about what we can know about the social world and other people, that other humans matter both for their own sake and for our happiness, and that remembering all of this will help make the world a better place, one interaction at a time.
Are there other connections with the robustness principle that I’ve missed? Does it really create robust human social worlds? Are there weaknesses to the robustness principle that I’m overlooking (here are some criticisms of it in programming, for example)?
As always, tell me in the comments! And - please - share and subscribe!