Keeping one and not the set

The four routes to it

1. You saved the one you first used and never went back for the others.
2. You had three and pruned the quiet ones, which is the habit examined in quiet and then back.
3. You have three somewhere but only one where you can reach it, which is the same thing in practice.
4. You believe you know the others well enough to recognise them, which is not the same as being able to produce them.

Why the fourth is the most common

Recognition is a strong feeling and a weak capability. After using the set for a while, all three look familiar, and familiarity is easily mistaken for possession.

The test is exact and takes ten seconds: without looking anything up, produce all three as pasteable text. Recognition fails that test every time.

What it guarantees

That on the day your address does not open, you will have to go and find another. That is the search described in what a second address buys you, and it is the single worst position in this subject.

It is not a risk of an error. It is a guarantee of being in the state where errors are made, at the moment when judgement is worst.

Why it feels reasonable at the time

Keeping one address is tidy. It works, it is the one you use, and the others are notionally available if you ever want them. Every step of that reasoning is correct except the last.

The others are available from sources, and sources are the thing you will not want to be evaluating in a hurry.

The cost of the fix

Copying three lines of text into a file. That is the entire remedy, and its size relative to the consequence is the reason this study exists at all.

The buttons beside the strings on this page exist for exactly that, and the list you keep covers what keeping them properly looks like.

What holding the set changes

• A quiet route becomes an eight second event rather than an evening.
• You gain the diagnostic in quiet on your side, which needs more than one route to work.
• You gain a comparison to check any offered string against, which is the only definite check available.
• You never search under pressure, which is where the genuinely costly mistakes live.

The one line version

The set is only worth something to a reader who is holding all of it. Two thirds of the benefit of plurality is thrown away by the least deliberate act in the whole subject, which is not getting round to copying two more lines.

A note on where you keep them

Somewhere you will actually reach at a bad moment. A store that is technically complete and practically awkward fails in the same way as an incomplete one, because the difficulty lands exactly when patience is lowest.

The distance between knowing and holding

Everybody who reads this page will agree with it. A large share of them will still be holding one address a month later, because agreeing is free and copying two lines requires a moment of action that never quite arrives.

That gap is the real subject of this study. It is not an argument anybody disputes. It is a task nobody performs, and the only useful response to it is to perform the task while reading rather than afterwards.

The buttons beside the three strings at the top of this page are there for exactly that purpose, and they take about ten seconds to use.

What this study is not. It is not advice about storage software, and nothing here recommends any particular tool or device.