Sturgeon’s Law(“90% of everything is crap”) came up again in the “Gilligan’s Island” thread. It made me wonder whether the 90% is a constant or whether it fluctuates. In other words, perhaps during a relatively creative artistic period “only” 85% of everything will be crap and during an artistic “dark age” the level will be 95% or greater.
What’s your view? Let’s discuss.
It fluctuates. Sometimes only 89% of everything is crap.
Well, certainly. And it’s very different by genre.
Only 10% of Baroque Music sucks.
Meanwhile, 99.9% of Romance Novels suck.
It’s an approximation. Actually, it’s a wild guess as to ratio. The real ratio fluctuates.
It fluctuates.
For example, over the past 3 years or so, an unusually high proportion of pop music has been pretty damn good.
ZOMG GET THE PITCHFORKS AND TORCHES!!! SHE SAID SOMETHING GOOD ABOUT POP MUSIC!!
On YouTube, the ratio is more like 99.999%.
It not only fluctuates, it fluctuates by person and by minute.
Definitely fluctuates. If you don’t like the genre, the crud ratio can easily exceed 99 percent. After all, some dislike superhero comics, romance novels, rock music and Norman Rockwell paintings. Some even dislike Godzilla movies, as incredible as this may seem.
I say well under 20% of NPR is crap. Over at the Unaboard I calculated that 85% of all movies are …filler, though obviously there is subjectivity. Which is a little better than 90%. In my sample 1% were genuine classics. (Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Fellini’s 8 1/2 if you are curious.)
Pareto puts the ratio at 80%.
It’s not a formula, it’s a rule of thumb.
It means roughly 90%, not exactly 90%.
Popular music is a good example but, as true with anything having to do with the arts, YMMV. For me, a better example would be the state of music between 1964 and 1971. I think that period represents the peak era of artistic achievement in popular music (rock especially) for the latter half of the 20th century. And yet, within a few years after it ended, things quickly went down the dumper. (If you don’t believe me, just listen to most of the popular records from 1974 and try not to upchuck.) I think what happened to the state of music during the mid and late 1970s not only proves Sturgeon’s Law fluctuates but also that a relatively fruitful period where the crap level falls below 90% will be followed by a corrective fallow period where the crap level runs above 90%.
No, trust me - 90% is about right. Only 10% of **extant **Baroque music sucks, but that’s because a lot of the dross didn’t get preserved (and probably rightly so).
That’s an important point. Both time and distance filters out the bad stuff. Thus, Americans think European films are all of high quality simply because the stinkers never make it here. Or Greek tragedies are considered so good because only the good ones were preserved.
Who’s to say that during a particularly creative period that 95% of everything is crap, but 1% is merely not crappy, and 4% is truly exceptional?
Or that 80% of everything is crap, 18% is not crap but nothing remarkable, and 4% is exceptional, and 1% is Michelangelo-caliber?
“90% of everything is crap” is just a rule of thumb to point out that the vast, vast majority of things produced are cruddy, and a small percentage are actually decent. The corollary to that is that what we see years later almost always comes from the 10% of that time period.
Agreed. In my interpretation of Sturgeon’s Law, the “crap” includes not just the works that are actively bad, but also the forgetable, the interchangeable, the filler: the works that, if those particular works had not been written, we wouldn’t really be missing anything, even if they are capable of being enjoyed. While the famous accusation that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto 500 times may not be fair, there is some sameness to much of Baroque music, especially among its lesser composers.
As to the main question: I do think the percentage fluctuates by era and/or genre. I think you get a particularly high percentage of crap in (sub)genres that go through a period of faddish popularity, when the demand is higher than the supply for high-quality stuff and much dreck gets written by imitators and people wanting to cash in.
It was said upthread but it needs to be repeated regularly: A Rule of Thumb is not an exact measurement. It merely tells you how to bet.
The other side of this is that unless you’re a insider professional in the field, you have no idea what the entirety of the field looks like. Sturgeon was talking about science fiction back in the day when a dedicated fan could read everything that was printed. Even so, that wasn’t the entire field. Every editor knew that 90% of what was submitted to the magazines was unpublishable amateurism. It was called the slush pile. That pejorative lives on to this day.
What the public sees is never a true picture of the field. Back in the 1960s, there were few opportunities for stand-up comedians. Just making a living meant that one had to be among a handful of the best. When the comedy boom hit in the 1980s, a thousand comedy outlets opened and they had insatiable appetites for product so that mediocre comics now could stay in longer. I still would bet that if you asked someone who knew the field, they’d say that the proportions of great, good, and not good stayed the same; only their relative visibility changed.
And if you really wanted to get into an argument that can never be settled, you ask: who defines what "good " is?
For episodic television, I prefer Rod Serling’s ratios.
He said, about the Twilight Zone, that he figured there were about a third great episodes, a third fair, and a third crap, and because of the limitations of the medium that was about the best you could hope for.
By that rule, Star Trek is a good show, but Gilligan’s Island isn’t. 
I feel it fluctuates. I think the average quality of works in a genre declines when the genre grows more popular. The reason for this is when a genre isn’t generally popular, the only people who are working in it are those who genuinely love the genre. But when a genre becomes popular, hacks start working in it just because it looks like a good place to make money.
It’s a constant. Only 10% of anything can be in the 90th percentile or better.
And, of course, it was originally just a quip, a snappy comeback.
You’re probably right… To me, even the lesser stuff that we have now is pretty good, however. I’d love to have a wider sampling, to make a broader assessment. Who knows how many gems are lost, along with all the dross?
It’s correct to within 1 significant digit.
It’s a lower bound.