factoids > laws:

Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crud

-- Ted Sturgeon World Science Fiction Covention, Philadelphia, 1953

as related in the anecdote:

 "When people talk about the mystery novel," Ted said, as I remember, "they mention The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. When they talk about the western, they say there's The Way West and Shane. But when they talk about science fiction, they call it 'that Buck Rogers stuff,' and they say 'ninety percent of science fiction is crud.' Well, they're right. Ninety percent of science fiction is crud. But then ninety percent of everything is crud, and it's the ten percent that isn't crud that is important. And the ten percent of science fiction that isn't crud is as good as or better than anything being written anywhere."

-- James Gunn The New York Review of Science Fiction #85, September 1995"

I've always been a fan of Sturgeon's law, probably because I've been reading science fiction since about the third grade. It's becoming increasingly relevant in this knowledge economy. The only way to effectively cope with information overload is to be ruthless about Sturgeon's Law.

Paradoxically, this is what makes the current surge in weblogs so important. Sure, it's easy to pick on the 90%. But that completely misses the value in that 10%. When you find high-quality sources like The Shifted Librarian or Serious Instructional Technology (to name two that I subscribe to), you're using the technology to amplify your effectiveness by enlisting more human intelligence instead of brute computational force. 

I think that this is what Dave Winer has been trying to do (see The Two-Way Web for example).  It's a bootstrapping approach to knowledge management that splits the work between individuals, groups, and technology in a way that leverages the strength of each

4:03:22 PM •  • comment  

Mercury News | 02/28/2002 | Intel backs consumers over Hollywood

``Any attempt to inject a regulatory process into the design of our products will irreparably damage the high-tech industry,'' Vadasz says in prepared testimony. ``It will substantially retard innovation, investment in new technologies, and will reduce the usefulness of our products to consumers.'' (emphasis added)

Power struggles are nothing new. Neither is technology innovation as the impetus for the struggle. What makes digital technologies more difficult to grasp in this context is that it takes an intellectual effort to understand what is and is not possible. Digital technologies are invisible in ways that previous technologies were not. Clarke's 3rd Law applies to digital technology with a fierceness you don't see with other technologies. That's why the responses seem so clueless to those who can see behind the magic.

3:27:41 PM •  • comment  

Smart company 

[Doc Searls Weblog]

From the Fast Company interview:

The belief in centralized management isn't just a business decision. It's part of a larger, neurotic understanding about our place in the world. For the past century, Americans have been obsessed with controlling everything. It's neurotic because the human condition is about living in a world that we didn't make and that we can't control. In that sense, the Web's lack of control -- its very architecture -- is a celebration of being human in a universe that joyously overwhelms us.

Part of the obsession with controlling is the Industrial Revolution's central metaphor of the machine. In that metaphor design and execution are separated. A very small number of people design the machines (organizations, economies, markets, systems) and a very large number of people execute their well-defined role inside the design.

While there's been much talk about the emergence of new metaphors that are fundamentally organic, there's been little recognition that these new metaphors require a new relationship between design and execution. Organic does not simply imply mindless execution and Darwinian survival of the fittest. While intelligent design is a poor excuse for a theory of evolutionary biology it is the right stance to adopt in human and economic environments. In this new world, design and execution are now tightly integrated. Design now becomes a responsibility of large numbers of people in the system (approximately all of us). I believe this design responsibility is a major source of the anxiety expressed in this new economic context.

10:39:14 AM •  • comment  

SATN.org: Comments from Bob Frankston, David Reed, Dan Bricklin, and others: "The biggest threat to the Internet is the confusion between technology and social policy. It is unfortunate that so many people confuse DNS with a trademark or keyword system. Those are services that can only be resolved by the marketplace. There is no technical solution to the problems of ambiguity and human perception. The DNS must be nothing more than a mechanism for implementing these policies. "

I continue to be surprised that our policy and strategy making processes remain pridefully ignorant of technology. While we have intelligent people like Frankston who can and do make an effort to lay out the issues, getting the right audience to actually listen is a Sisyphean task.

One of the giveaway phrases of the willfully ignorant is "how hard can it be?" This is rarely a legitimate request for input. Rather, it is magical thinking in line with Joel's comments on the Iceberg Secret.

9:45:07 AM •  • comment