the.com/robustness
the art of not falling over when the world stops behaving like your spreadsheet.
means a system's ability to keep working correctly even when inputs, conditions, or assumptions get messy or unexpected.
from from latin robustus, meaning oak-hard, sturdy as timber; engineers borrowed it to mean things that bend without breaking, statisticians borrowed it to mean estimates that don't panic over outliers.
vs resiliencerobustness resists change, resilience recovers from it
statistics meaningmedian beats mean because it ignores outliers
tradeoffoften costs speed or elegance to gain it
for instance
boeing 747 wing — flexes 26 feet upward before structural failure
cockroaches — survived 5 mass extinctions over 300 million years
median household income — used over mean to resist billionaire skew