You may have heard it as Sturgeon’s law – whichever way you hear it, revelation or law, it is a simple statement: “90% of everything is crap.” It has a lot of similarity to the Pareto Principle. Wilifredo Pareto was an Italian sociologist (and engineer) who noticed that 20% of Italians owned 80% of Italy. Later, the Pareto Principle was expanded:
20% of the work produces 80% of the accomplishment.
The Pareto Principle is a generalization – I’ve worked in departments where 20% created 100% of the accomplishment. I watched one colleague spend two years looking into windbreaks on the Great Plains – if the project had been mine, I would have made about three telephone calls, then waited for the heirs of the Soil Conservation Service in three states to share their fifty years of findings. I am sure there are other areas of inquiry where I lack the experience to know who to call.
I learned the Pareto Principle in an Environmental Engineering class – specifically on cleaning up wastewater. 20% of the effort removes 80% of the pollutants. Kind of a law of diminishing returns. Which brings me back to Sturgeon’s Revelation: 90% of Everything is Crap. Several times I have had people encourage me to “Read my Thesis!” or dissertation “To really understand X”. The problem is, Sturgeon was right. I suspect 90% of the Ph.D. dissertations go onto a library shelf and are never accessed. I have looked at Einstein’s dissertation – because it was Einstein’s. It deals with finding Avogadro’s number by examining sugar in solution. It doesn’t take long to read. It was original research. It shows some great insight. What it doesn’t do is get so close to Avogadro’s number as I could get by opening a high school chemistry book in 1966. Despite it being Einstein’s dissertation, time moved along, making it irrelevant. Not even Einstein’s dissertation has been immune to Sturgeon’s revelation.
So don’t read my thesis – it continues to be picked up and quoted, but like Einstein’s it is timing out, and will likely age into crap before I do. The miracle is that other researchers kept taking it from the shelf, reading it, and referencing it as long as they did. It’s getting close to it’s Sturgeon moment.
If I think of the songs I have listened to, I have to agree with Sturgeon. I’m sure 90% of the movies I watched are crap. I think I have been fortunate to live in a world where 20% of my effort got 80% of the accomplishment. And I can’t help applying Sturgeon’s Revelation to our career politicians – 90 percent of everything is crap.
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