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{{quote|''90% of everything is crud.''}}
This is Sturgeon's Revelation, but common usage has it that this phrase is what is meant when the Law is cited. The actual quote for the Law is, "Nothing is always absolutely so."
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The first reference to Sturgeon's Revelation appears in the March 1958 issue of ''Venture Science Fiction,'' where science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon wrote:
{{quote|
There is also a (possibly apocryphal) story that tells of Sturgeon making the above comment during a panel discussion at a science fiction convention. When the audience protested, Sturgeon reportedly blinked and replied, "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.''
* [[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.
**
**
* [[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 "[[
* [[Martian Successor Nadesico|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
If we assume that the 90% figure applies only to published works, then about [[Million
Often the phrase is followed by the even more cynical addendum, "... including the other 10%." Rarely, a more optimistic second clause is added:
{{quote|'' "...but the remaining 10% [[So Cool
A more ominous reading has it that ''Sturgeon's Law is a baseline''. In other words, though '''at least''' 90% of a given thing is crud, it does not necessarily follow that the remaining tenth is all good. For a given subtype of medium, genre, etc., the percentage of crud may range from the minimum 90%, to 95%, to 99.99[vapor trail of 9s]%.
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A related adage is employed by critic [[Zero Punctuation|Yahtzee Croshaw]], known as the ''[[Take That|Guantánamo Bay approach]]'', who declares in one review that:
{{quote|''Everything is shit until proven otherwise.''}}
And in another review that:
{{quote|''Even if declaring a game to be shit after its first few hours of gameplay is perfectly professional, [[Disappointing Last Level|one should never assume that a game that starts out good will stay that way]].''}}
The [[Nostalgia Filter]] and [[Import Filter]] can be considered both side effects of this and a major balancing factor.
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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]]; [[
See also [[
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:Laws and Formulas]]
[[Category:Meta Concepts]]
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