9 ms·
90 percent of everything is crap
- cushychicken 11y ago"If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you're a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind." - Kurt Vonnegut These two things in tandem should be enough to motivate anyone to take a stab at a problem.
- chanandler_bong 11y ago“Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” - Ron Swanson
- dahart 11y ago"If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." - G.K. Chesterton.
- empressplay 11y ago"But I was using my whole ass!" -- Homer Simpson
- yolesaber 11y ago"Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is never try." ~ Homer Simpson
- Pitarou 11y agoVery true. Ask anyone who's worked as a "consultant" in some emergent field. A lot of them feel like frauds. But the truth is that, because it's all so new, nobody really knows anything, so all you need is background knowledge from related areas and the confidence to make it up as you go along.
- amelius 11y agoCan this law be applied to itself?
- chimericray 11y agoIt's not a law in the strict sense.
- rusabd 11y agoCrappy law then?
- alanwatts 11y agoThere's a 90% chance this law is bs.
- squidbidness 11y agoBut that's just the prior, isn't it? What's the full Bayesian picture?
- meric 11y agoHaving been in the field of software, I know a lot of software is rickety. Having studied and learnt a lot about finance, I know one rarely gets rich following advice of financial planners. Having worked in fast food, I know during busy period a lot of procedures are skipped. Working with other students and myself in high school and university I know how haphazardly put together most homework and assignments are. The miracle isn't in how good is the best humanity has to offer, but how good human life is, despite human civilisation building itself on a mountain of crap.
- bliti 11y agoHow good human life is for those who won the birth lottery. Everyone else gets to enjoy the mountain of crap.
- vbtemp 11y agoBeautiful comment
- rms_returns 11y agoWhats really interesting is that despite all its flaws and a million things that could go wrong, the systems designed by humans actually work. Despite open source is developed by a bunch of hackers who keep delivering buggy code, you can still close your eyes and install Ubuntu and it will usually work in 95% of cases. Even if you go to the most popular fast food outlet during the busiest of hours, you usually get to eat that tasty pizza even the humans did not all procedures. You see, they are humans, they may err but they have an uncanny judgment that comes from practice which is capable of finding and fixing their errors before they are delivered.
- sametmax 11y agoMore than that: cars. We have millions of explosive-powered heavy metal boxes running fast on unprotected lanes, their path solely directed by unreliable biological organismes following conventions from blinking lights and painted signs. But most of the time, it works.
- warrenmiller 11y agoReminds me of the half life of knowledge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge
- motdiem 11y agoThe wikipedia article links to it, but I'd recommend "The Half Life of Facts", which introduced me to this concept - it's an entertaining and insightful read.
- chanandler_bong 11y agoSo, of the remaining 10% which is not crap, 90% of that is crap. Following this logic, everything is crap, which seems about right.
- Bouncingsoul1 11y agoFollowing this logic, everything is crap and turing complete
- dhruvmittal 11y agoCrapturtles all the way down.
- NoGravitas 11y agoZeno's crapadox.
- galfarragem 11y agoTheoretically, in the end, everything might be crap but in reality we will never arrive that point once apparently there will always exist things that don't look like crap. There is hope!
- kasey_junk 11y agoSturgeon is my favorite SF writer. Highly recommend picking some of his stuff up. For some reason he seems under represented amongst the famous SF authors of the period.
- Freak_NL 11y agoAbsolutely. Sturgeon seems like one of those writers you tend to discover by picking up a second hand paperback with his work on a whim. Second hand book stores and book fairs are great places to pick up some of his novels and short story collections on the cheap.
- kasey_junk 11y agoThat's exactly how I found him. Now any time I'm in a used bookstore I look for something of his I don't own.
- sitkack 11y ago"The Girl Had Guts" was apparently "embraced" almost shot-for-shot into Alien. Amazing short story.
- nck4222 11y agoPerhaps science fiction was receiving the criticism because it was fairly new at the time, and there wasn't much of it. With other arts you could point to countless anecdotes of genius, while with sf at the time, there were a handful.
- dschiptsov 11y agoWith cheap paper-back publishing, blogs and now social media. modern copy-paste, citation-compiling "science", the percentage is approaching a hundred.
- awesomerobot 11y ago90% is really generous
- coldcode 11y ago90% of Hacker News content is crap. However, you can learn a lot by studying crap and do the opposite. Since 90% of that is crap as well, well, crap.
- krapp 11y agoYes, but it's crap of a higher quality than Reddit, and that's what matters. Hacker News is the crap of the crop.
- yomism 11y agoSo 90% of the comments you are reading here are crap...
- flurpitude 11y ago100% of excrement is crap. Therefore this law is false.
- marmoto 11y agoIsn't most of it water?
- sitkack 11y agoIsn't water the best stuff on earth? So crap isn't even crap anymore.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- nwah1 11y ago90% of it is also crap, though, so the law is still true.
- dahart 11y ago"Hayduke finished his morning tea and repaired to the shelter of a juniper. He dug a hole, squatted again and shat. He checked his stool: structurally perfect. This was going to be a good day." [The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey]
- akeck 11y agoMy personal experience in photography is closer to "99% of everything is crap". About 1 in 100 of my photos has the minimum level of artistry I want. That being said, about 1 in 1000 have really high impact. This jives with dschiptsov's comment about creative content on the 'net in general. I wonder if the power curve of quality of a some type of work compresses out to the high and low ends as the total number of works of that type grows.
- cpdean 11y ago90 percent of the internet is javascript
- empressplay 11y agoI always apply the 80/20 rule to everything, so I'd say 80 instead of 90 but I certainly understand the sentiment.
- dilemma 11y agoI believe this rule to be true in general, and in all environments. I.e. 90% of software developers (or any other profession) are terrible at their job. But this _also_ goes for prestigious company environments like Google -- 90% of Google developers are mediocre. And conversely, the top 10% of developers in a 100 man, mid-west company that you've never heard of do work on the same level as the top 10% of Googlers. (This does not extend to functions that the small firm does not have, i.e. R&D.) This is partly due to selection (firms filter out exceptionally good people and select for mediocrity) but also due to the hierarchical nature of social organizations: only the top of the pyramid have the agency and corresponding authority to think critically instead of obey orders, and do important original work.
- dahart 11y agoSo this originated from a defense of sci fi, and appears to talk about low quality. But if you think about it, this law is really a tataulogy, and is less judgmental than it sounds. It's a statement that in any category to which one applies a metric, there will be a ranking, and thus a top 10% will always exist. It is drawing an arbitrary line at 90/10, and that arbitrary line can be drawn for any category that exists - there is no wrong choice. There is always a top 10%. The line can be drawn somewhere else, at 75/25, or 99/1, it really doesn't matter if you reflect on the idea that there's always a best under any metric, and always a large set under the same metric that you can and should ignore for the purposes of determining what is "good".
- known 11y agoIt's not crap; It's irrelevant for you;
- pkinchla 11y agoYou are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We're all part of the same compost heap. We're all singing, all dancing crap of the world.
- copperx 11y ago> You are not special. You're not a beautiful and unique snowflake. It really depends on the level of abstraction. In the big picture, yes, sure. But if you zoom in, my neural pathways aren't shared by anyone else, and probably never will in the history of the universe.
- sixtypoundhound 11y agoA longer exposition on the concept, at ribbonfarm... http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/03/12/the-art-of-agile-leadership/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/03/12/the-art-of-agile-leader... tl;dr: fate of civilization rests on .1% of our effort...
- SZJX 11y agoIs that anything very surprising though. Surely similar things have been expressed a lot elsewhere. Even the very basic normal distribution tells us something similar as well. So I don't think it really helps a lot in any way. I'd only say that 90% might be too extreme a number for "crap". You may say they just fell short of being magnificent but "rubbish" is really an overstatement.