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Sturgeon's Law: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{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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* 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.''
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* [[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]][[
* [[Martian Successor Nadesico (Anime)|Ruri]]'s Law:'' "The vast majority of people are idiots".'' or, in other words, ''You're probably crud.''
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.
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.
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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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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 [[
{{reflist}}
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