202312201432 Sturgeon's Law

Ninety percent of everything is crap.¹

Coined by Theodore Sturgeon in a 1957 edition of Venture Science Fiction, the quote was used in the context of critique. Sturgeon argued that science fiction — which at the time was derided for its low quality — was no different than other genres. He argued that all genres were mostly poor and therefore valid criticism against a genre (or anything really) should be leveled against the best examples of that genre rather than the 90% that's crap.

This is one of the most common problems that I have with modern writing, argumentation, and criticism. Many books, articles, blog posts, etc. level arguments in bad faith against a poor example of how something works in order to advocate for some other thing.

There is a small counterpoint, or perhaps more accurately, footnote to this idea though. It can be valuable for criticism to be leveled against the whole of an idea. For instance, if you focus your criticism against the best 10% of the idea and feel you've come to a conclusion or alternate idea, it can still be valuable to talk about the other 90% as an example of the scope of the downsides. If the worst 90% of my position result in better outcomes than the worst 90% of another position, that's a valuable data point.

A corollary of this is that we're more likely to be involved with the production and consumption of the crap. But I believe that should only serve to encourage us to develop better aesthetic judgement and higher quality creative output.

This idea may have been popularized by Sturgeon, but there is evidence that there were similarly expressed sentiments in the public knowledge dating back to 1890. See the citation for more information.