Sturgeon's Law: Difference between revisions

* [[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 Planet|LittleBig]][[Godwin's Law|Holocaust.]]"''

 

Sturgeon's Law is particularly obvious when the barriers to entry -- the whims of publishers -- 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 [[Fanfiction.net]] is like flipping through hell with an occasional slice of the heavenly cheesecake thrown in."

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.

 

 

See also [[Sturgeon's Tropes]] -- tropes that aren't in and of themselves bad, but are ''usually'' done badly.