Ninety percent of everything is crud.
Sturgeon said it defending science fiction: ninety percent of everything is crud, so judging a genre by its worst is meaningless. It is a rule about sampling, not about quality.
In practice
- A commissioning editor reads two hundred submissions to fill twenty pages, and the twenty say nothing about the genre the two hundred came from.
- A manager who judges a recruitment channel by its worst applicant closes the one that produced two of the department's best.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Creativity & Work
- Essay
- The success literature and its sceptics