Sturgeon’s Law

Perhaps my favourite page on Wikipedia is the List of Eponymous Laws. These are all dictums of sufficient pith and profundity that they bear the names of those given credit for them, and it’s hard to think of a richer trove of wisdom.

One I’m especially fond of is Sturgeon’s Law:

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

At first blush, this might seem more like a peevish, juvenile outburst than a profound and universal truth, but true enlightenment demands some contemplation.

As an aid to understanding, consider it alongside the Pareto Principle, which also appears in the above List:

[for many outcomes] 80% of consequences stem from 20% of causes.

This might seem just as glib, until you understand it’s an observation which fits a huge number of phenomena across fields as diverse as economics, sociology, lean manufacturing, and natural disaster management. It describes a power law relationship, and is no less “real” than the normal distributions we’ve been conditioned by experience to expect.

The difference between the two, and Sturgeon’s critical insight, is that he wasn’t talking about wealth inequality or bushfires, but the utterly terrible shit people produce when they’re doing the very best they can. He was talking about novels; art; software; music; scientific research; medicine. Every field in which our species’ highest achievements can stir wonder in our hearts, is overwhelmingly swamped by profoundly awful bullshit.

Besides coining his eponymous law, Theodore Sturgeon was also the inspiration for Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional science-fiction writer, Kilgore Trout. It seems almost implausibly coincidental that some of Kurt’s most quotable lines of dialogue are also a delightfully insightful riff on Sturgeon’s Law:

“Almost nobody’s competent, Paul. It’s enough to make you cry to see how bad most people are at their jobs. If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.”

And there it is. Someone who earns a living by doing something every day of their working lives in exchange for money is, in a certain, narrow sense, a professional. They are not necessarily good, though; in fact, they are overwhelmingly likely to be really quite bad at their chosen profession.

Wait a minute, you might interject, these adages seem to be in disagreement. Is it 10% or 20% of people who can actually perform their job effectively? To which I must regrettably answer: no, it isn’t.

Nor are they necessarily at odds. A lot obviously depends on what exactly you’re sampling, but we’ve established 90% of everything is crap, and it’s likely 80% of it is produced by just 20% of the people. Being prolific will tend to correlate positively with being competent; the least productive quintile are less likely to be taking the time perfection demands, than simply failing to produce anything much at all. And that’s without even accounting for negative productivity, which sounds like an absurd exaggeration until you’ve actually experienced it. All of which is to say, if 90% of everything is crap, substantially fewer than 10% of the people are capable of anything better.

I’d suggest roughly the top 5% in a given field are responsible for nearly all of the reliably good outcomes. A corollary of this is that if you go around trusting people just because they’re, say, a doctor, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to have a bad time.

Isn’t that an unreasonably high bar, you might ask? Only one in twenty people are in the top 5%. Surely I’m not saying if you can’t roll a natural 20 you should just … give up?

Well, in a sense, I suppose I am. We’d all be better off acknowledging that a lot of people currently in the workforce are doing way more harm than good, and we should pay them a universal income to do something less damaging. Hopefully that day will come; in the meantime, all we can do is try to lessen their impact.

Besides, maybe you’re underestimating yourself. You’re reading this, which puts you in a niche much smaller than 5% right off the bat. You might just not realise what it’s really like out there.

I believe in you. If you set high standards for yourself, go to the trouble to learn from the people at the top of your field, and care enough to put in the work, you can probably be good enough to … well, you’ve got a decent chance to … not be completely shit.