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{{quote|''90% of everything is crud.''}}
 
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* Corollary 1: ''The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.''
* Corollary 2: ''The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field.'' (Note: It is clear this doesn't ''necessarily'' follow from the Revelation- sci fi has minor advantages and disadvantages compared to other genres, and differing amounts of literature compared to other genres. If a thousand write sci fi, but a hundred thousand write real world, do the maths.)
* Crawford's Corollary: ''Should you ever find that less than 90% seem to be crap, your standard is set too low and should be adjusted.''
* Critic's Corollary: ''90% of people lack the taste necessary to distinguish between crud and non-crud.''
** Critic's Second Corollary: ''90% of people will criticize 90% of what they see regardless of their ability to distinguish crud from non-crud.''
* All The[[TV Tropes]]' Corollary: ''The difficulty of getting a group of people to agree on '''which''' 10% is '''not''' crud [[Your Mileage May Vary|exponentially approaches infinity as the size of the group increases. ]]'' (Or, "Crud is in the eye of the beholder... so to speak.")
** All TheTV Tropes' Second Corollary: ''The other 90% of crud is further divided into [[Love It or Hate It|"Subjective Crud,"]] [[So Bad It's Good|"Crud You]] [[Guilty Pleasure|Like Anyway"]], and [[Epic Fail|"Total Crud."]] The exact proportions of this division have never been researched, and most likely varies by the individual for reasons mentioned above.''
** All TheTV Tropes' Laconic Corollary: ''Ninety percent of [[Laconic Wiki]] articles are crud.''
* [[The Theorem of Narrow Interests]]: ''The more constrained the thing you're looking for, the fewer good examples exist.''
** Also: ''If a video game has user-created content, a large amount of it will be based on [[Video Game Perversity Potential|male or female genitalia]] or "[[Little Big PlanetLittleBigPlanet|LittleBig]][[Godwin's Law|Holocaust.]]"''
* [[Martian Successor Nadesico (Anime)|Ruri]]'s Law:'' "The vast majority of people are idiots".'' or, in other words, ''You're probably crud.''
* [[w:Isaac Bonewits|Bonewits]]' Law: ''"[W]hen it comes to stuff written about magic, 99.9% of everything is crap."'' (From his book ''Real Magic: An Introductory Treatise on the Basic Principles of Yellow Magic'').
 
Sturgeon's Law is particularly obvious when the barriers to entry -- theentry—the whims of publishers -- arepublishers—are removed. Self-publishing, especially in the virtually cost-free environment of the Internet, makes the cruddy 90% ''very'' visible to the public; it no longer languishes in an aspiring writer's desk drawer. This often leads to the false impression that [[Fanfic]] attracts poor writers; the fact is that the poor writers have ''always'' been out there, but until recently, their poor writing had few mass outlets. As one writer put it, "flipping through [[Fan Fiction Dot Net|Fanfiction.net]] is like flipping through hell with an occasional slice of the heavenly cheesecake thrown in."
 
If we assume that the 90% figure applies only to published works, then about [[Million -to -One Chance|one in a million of all things out there]] is not crud. Most people, though, have seen more than one non-cruddy thing in their lifetime.
 
Often the phrase is followed by the even more cynical addendum, "... including the other 10%." Rarely, a more optimistic second clause is added:
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There is a related principle actually observed in economics, the Pareto Principle or "80-20 rule": 80% of the work is done by 20% of the group. This makes sense if you think about it: in a given group there will be, for whatever reason, variation in the capability of its constituent individuals, and by and large, variation tends to take the form of a bell-curve distribution: the vast majority are average or near-average, with occurrence correlating to rarity. So, if you take that curve (representing the number of individuals at each level of performance) and multiply by said level of performance, you get a plot showing how the total amount of work done is distributed among the various levels of performance, which will obviously be skewing towards the higher-performance end. The rule is an approximation and the exact ratio will vary with the situation, but the general principle is very widespread in situations involving normal and power law distributions. The principal is also used in Statistical Process Control, a mathematical approach to quality control, stating that generally, 80% of total defects are caused by 20% of known failure modes.
 
May be [[Older Than They Think]]; [[Benjamin Disraeli (Creator)|Benjamin Disraeli]] wrote in 1870: "Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense."
 
See also [[Sturgeon's Tropes]] -- tropes—tropes that aren't in and of themselves bad, but are ''usually'' done badly.
 
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:Laws and Formulas]]
[[Category:Meta Concepts]]
[[Category:Mass Effect (Franchise)/Fanfic Recs{{PAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Sturgeons Law]]
[[Category:Trope]]
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