
90 percent of everything is crap - vincent_s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
======
meric
Having been in the field of software, I know a lot of software is rickety.
Having studied and learnt a lot about finance, I know one rarely gets rich
following advice of financial planners. Having worked in fast food, I know
during busy period a lot of procedures are skipped. Working with other
students and myself in high school and university I know how haphazardly put
together most homework and assignments are. The miracle isn't in how good is
the best humanity has to offer, but how good human life is, despite human
civilisation building itself on a mountain of crap.

~~~
doctorstupid
Good point. However, I think the miracle is exchanged for another one if you
believe that civilization was built not on a mountain of crap, but through the
efforts of the few who put true rigor into their contributions. Science,
philosophy, art, politics, religion and so on have been developed by a
relatively minuscule handful of individuals throughout the ages. These greats
have built us the walls of civilization which have been filled with crap from
within. In my opinion civilization is not built upon a mountain of crap, but
is the very walls keeping the crap in place. That these walls are strong
enough is the true miracle.

~~~
rayiner
A handful of people invented the internal combustion engine, but thousands of
engineers and hundreds of thousands of factory workers and mechanics, of
various shades of competence, designed and built the actual engine in your
car.

A handful of singular individuals penned the broad outlines of our
Constitutional structure, but it's the masses of people that built the system
and keep it running. The difference between say Bangladesh and the United
States is not the ingenuity of their respective founding documents, but the
file clerk at the American courthouse who wouldn't even think of taking a
bribe, versus his counterpart.

Big ideas mean nothing without execution, and it's the plebes that do the
execution. Every great endeavor lives and dies by the virtue of the rank-and-
file people undertaking it.

~~~
selimthegrim
Word. [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/world/asia/bangladesh-
cour...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/world/asia/bangladesh-court-islam-
state-religion.html)

------
cushychicken
"If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a
kingdom of the blind." \- Kurt Vonnegut

These two things in tandem should be enough to motivate anyone to take a stab
at a problem.

~~~
chanandler_bong
“Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” - Ron Swanson

~~~
dahart
"If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." \- G.K. Chesterton.

~~~
Pitarou
Nice quote, but that's not what Chesterton meant.

Chesterton had great respect for the wisdom of the common men. He believed
that the matters most important to society as a whole should not be left in
the hands of mere experts.

~~~
dahart
What's not what Chesterton meant?

------
dahart
So this originated from a defense of sci fi, and appears to talk about low
quality. But if you think about it, this law is really a tataulogy, and is
less judgmental than it sounds. It's a statement that in any category to which
one applies a metric, there will be a ranking, and thus a top 10% will always
exist. It is drawing an arbitrary line at 90/10, and that arbitrary line can
be drawn for any category that exists - there is no wrong choice. There is
always a top 10%. The line can be drawn somewhere else, at 75/25, or 99/1, it
really doesn't matter if you reflect on the idea that there's always a best
under any metric, and always a large set under the same metric that you can
and should ignore for the purposes of determining what is "good".

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chanandler_bong
So, of the remaining 10% which is not crap, 90% of that is crap.

Following this logic, everything is crap, which seems about right.

~~~
Bouncingsoul1
Following this logic, everything is crap and turing complete

~~~
dhruvmittal
Crapturtles all the way down.

------
akeck
My personal experience in photography is closer to "99% of everything is
crap". About 1 in 100 of my photos has the minimum level of artistry I want.
That being said, about 1 in 1000 have really high impact. This jives with
dschiptsov's comment about creative content on the 'net in general. I wonder
if the power curve of quality of a some type of work compresses out to the
high and low ends as the total number of works of that type grows.

------
warrenmiller
Reminds me of the half life of knowledge
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-
life_of_knowledge](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge)

~~~
motdiem
The wikipedia article links to it, but I'd recommend "The Half Life of Facts",
which introduced me to this concept - it's an entertaining and insightful
read.

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SZJX
Is that anything very surprising though. Surely similar things have been
expressed a lot elsewhere. Even the very basic normal distribution tells us
something similar as well. So I don't think it really helps a lot in any way.
I'd only say that 90% might be too extreme a number for "crap". You may say
they just fell short of being magnificent but "rubbish" is really an
overstatement.

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kasey_junk
Sturgeon is my favorite SF writer. Highly recommend picking some of his stuff
up. For some reason he seems under represented amongst the famous SF authors
of the period.

~~~
Freak_NL
Absolutely. Sturgeon seems like one of those writers you tend to discover by
picking up a second hand paperback with his work on a whim. Second hand book
stores and book fairs are great places to pick up some of his novels and short
story collections on the cheap.

~~~
kasey_junk
That's exactly how I found him. Now any time I'm in a used bookstore I look
for something of his I don't own.

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dschiptsov
With cheap paper-back publishing, blogs and now social media. modern copy-
paste, citation-compiling "science", the percentage is approaching a hundred.

------
dilemma
I believe this rule to be true in general, and in all environments. I.e. 90%
of software developers (or any other profession) are terrible at their job.
But this _also_ goes for prestigious company environments like Google -- 90%
of Google developers are mediocre. And conversely, the top 10% of developers
in a 100 man, mid-west company that you've never heard of do work on the same
level as the top 10% of Googlers. (This does not extend to functions that the
small firm does not have, i.e. R&D.)

This is partly due to selection (firms filter out exceptionally good people
and select for mediocrity) but also due to the hierarchical nature of social
organizations: only the top of the pyramid have the agency and corresponding
authority to think critically instead of obey orders, and do important
original work.

------
cpdean
90 percent of the internet is javascript

------
coldcode
90% of Hacker News content is crap. However, you can learn a lot by studying
crap and do the opposite. Since 90% of that is crap as well, well, crap.

~~~
krapp
Yes, but it's crap of a higher quality than Reddit, and that's what matters.
Hacker News is the crap of the crop.

~~~
koja86
Might I dare to childishly call your handle suitable without you being
offended?

~~~
krapp
Might as well, people have been doing that for years.

edit: and asking me what the frequency is.

------
sixtypoundhound
A longer exposition on the concept, at ribbonfarm...

[http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/03/12/the-art-of-agile-
leader...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/03/12/the-art-of-agile-leadership/)

tl;dr: fate of civilization rests on .1% of our effort...

------
amelius
Can this law be applied to itself?

~~~
chimericray
It's not a law in the strict sense.

~~~
rusabd
Crappy law then?

------
pkinchla
You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the
same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same
compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.

~~~
copperx
> You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake.

It really depends on the level of abstraction. In the big picture, yes, sure.
But if you zoom in, my neural pathways aren't shared by anyone else, and
probably never will in the history of the universe.

------
nck4222
Perhaps science fiction was receiving the criticism because it was fairly new
at the time, and there wasn't much of it. With other arts you could point to
countless anecdotes of genius, while with sf at the time, there were a
handful.

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awesomerobot
90% is really generous

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yomism
So 90% of the comments you are reading here are crap...

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empressplay
I always apply the 80/20 rule to everything, so I'd say 80 instead of 90 but I
certainly understand the sentiment.

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flurpitude
100% of excrement is crap. Therefore this law is false.

~~~
marmoto
Isn't most of it water?

~~~
sitkack
Isn't water the best stuff on earth? So crap isn't even crap anymore.

------
known
It's not crap; It's irrelevant for you;

