Which 90 is crap

Enter your email address and we'll send you a free PDF of this post. Share this:. Share 0. Law of Small Numbers September 07, All too often all that is wanted is some soothing balm, until the itch comes back later.

Thanks Paul. Looking forward to that upcoming series! The medical analogy is really interesting. Both a very complex systems, which muddies or distorts cause and effect, with non-linear and often unintended responses to interventions. This one is particularly good, Tim. Just goes to show how precious the real thing can be. Which is why you stand out, by the way.

Thanks Brian. The online content law is interesting. Each man kills the thing he loves, it is said; and some tend to poke fun at the things they respect, now when tight barriers of terror wall off the vacuum left by Mencken and Will Rogers less than previously, but still more than is tolerable to the devout. When they find crud in it and forget what was said above about a sieve; you can sieve up crud out of our dear field with a coal scoop they get scared.

Living in a cultural matrix dominated by the specter of Science, they will not tolerate a suggestion that we-uns are smearing it; or worse, the frightful hint that maybe Science is, after all, ninety-percent crud like everything else. Hence our really fine ten-percent hides in our vintage cellars except when somebody like Vercors or Orwell or even Shepherd Mead steams off the label and wholesales it in the Main Street markets.

The Revelation:. Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere. And publishers aren't the only filters of crap. Audiences have their own filters, like the Nostalgia Filter and the Import Filter , which skew certain genres away from Sturgeon's Law only because the crap has a hard time making it through the filter.

It's important to note that there's a bit of a spectrum of pessimism with respect to Sturgeon's Law. As one writer put it, "flipping through FanFiction. Net is like flipping through hell with an occasional slice of the heavenly cheesecake thrown in. Fandom being what it is, there are a lot of expansions, clarifications, and specific instances of Sturgeon's Revelation out there:.