Sturgeon's law
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Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage stating "ninety percent of everything is crap". It was coined by Theodore Sturgeon, an American science fiction author and critic, and was inspired by his observation that, while science fiction was often derided for its low quality by critics, most work in other fields was low-quality too, and so science fiction was no different.[1]
Development
Sturgeon deemed Sturgeon's law to mean "nothing is always absolutely so".[2] By this, he meant his observation (building on "Sturgeon's Revelation" that the majority of everything is of low quality) that the existence of a majority of low-quality content in every genre disproves the idea that any single genre is inherently low-quality. This adage previously appeared in his story "The Claustrophile" in a 1956 issue of Galaxy.[3]
The second adage, variously rendered as "ninety percent of everything is crud" or "ninety percent of everything is crap", was published as "Sturgeon's Revelation" in his book review column for Venture[4] in 1957. However, almost all modern uses of the term Sturgeon's law refer to the second,Script error: No such module "Unsubst". including the definition listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.[5]
According to science fiction author William Tenn, Sturgeon first expressed his law circa 1951, at a talk at New York University attended by Tenn.[6] The statement was subsequently included in a talk Sturgeon gave at a 1953 Labor Day weekend session of the World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia.[7]
The first written reference to the adage is in the September 1957 issue of Venture:
The adage appears again in the March 1958 issue of Venture, where Sturgeon wrote:
Precedents and proponents
In the 1870 novel, Lothair, by Benjamin Disraeli, it is asserted that:
Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.[8]
A similar adage appears in Rudyard Kipling's The Light That Failed, published in 1890.
A 1946 essay Confessions of a Book Reviewer by George Orwell asserts about books:
In 2009, a paper published in The Lancet estimated that over 85% of health and medical research is wasted.[9]
In 2013, philosopher Daniel Dennett championed Sturgeon's law as one of his seven tools for critical thinking.[10]
See also
References
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- ↑ "The Claustrophile", Galaxy August 1956
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External links
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- Theodore Sturgeon's 1972 interview with David G. Hartwell, The New York Review of Science Fiction #7 March 1989; #8 April 1989