Sturgeon’s Law is a counterargument against the negative stigma that Sci-Fi writing had as being crappy and therefore not a legitimate medium. The argument is 90% of any genre of writing, in fact anything from “cars, books, cheeses, people and pins” are “crud”. Although the sentiment does seem to have a precedent in a novel Lothair by British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli where a Mr. Phoebus says:
“nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are refutation of that nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of printing. Printing has destroyed education”
Following on from my quest for a decision making model for ideas, as I mention Sturgeon’s Law is a convenient albeit totally arbitrary metric for how many ideas should be good.
As Spanish author José Bergamín wrote (I can’t track down the original):
The quality of a man’s mind can generally be judged by the size of his wastepaper basket. [1]
For every 10 ideas I write down, one should be not-crud. If I have 100 film ideas (and I have more than that, many more) then 10 should be not-crud.
I think the obvious point to raise is that the opportunity cost for an idea, even if written down, is much lower than the opportunity cost of a book. As Gwern has tried to warn us. To take books as the prototypical example. There are many more people with ideas for books than have finished a book. Even a single author, each book may carry with it the unborn ghosts of hundreds of never written book ideas. We might expect that if only 1⁄10 books are “not crud” that perhaps that’s survivorship bias of ideas, because perhaps good ideas get favored and are more likely to be completed?
I know that compared to the amount of film ideas I have, I have around a 1⁄90 ratio between film ideas to finished screenplays. The ideas I pursue are the ones that seem most vivid, are most exciting and therefore seem like the ‘best’ ideas.
Which is the elephant in the room—sure 90% of anything might be crud, but what makes it crud? What distinguishes crud, and in this case crud ideas, be they ideas for books or ideas for films, and “good” ideas?
In the meantime it seems like the easy way out is to say
“look, don’t feel bad if you only have one okay idea for every nine crud ones. It’s perfectly acceptable”
Sturgeon’s Law but for ideas?
Sturgeon’s Law is a counterargument against the negative stigma that Sci-Fi writing had as being crappy and therefore not a legitimate medium. The argument is 90% of any genre of writing, in fact anything from “cars, books, cheeses, people and pins” are “crud”. Although the sentiment does seem to have a precedent in a novel Lothair by British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli where a Mr. Phoebus says:
Following on from my quest for a decision making model for ideas, as I mention Sturgeon’s Law is a convenient albeit totally arbitrary metric for how many ideas should be good.
As Spanish author José Bergamín wrote (I can’t track down the original):
For every 10 ideas I write down, one should be not-crud. If I have 100 film ideas (and I have more than that, many more) then 10 should be not-crud.
I think the obvious point to raise is that the opportunity cost for an idea, even if written down, is much lower than the opportunity cost of a book. As Gwern has tried to warn us. To take books as the prototypical example. There are many more people with ideas for books than have finished a book. Even a single author, each book may carry with it the unborn ghosts of hundreds of never written book ideas. We might expect that if only 1⁄10 books are “not crud” that perhaps that’s survivorship bias of ideas, because perhaps good ideas get favored and are more likely to be completed?
I know that compared to the amount of film ideas I have, I have around a 1⁄90 ratio between film ideas to finished screenplays. The ideas I pursue are the ones that seem most vivid, are most exciting and therefore seem like the ‘best’ ideas.
Which is the elephant in the room—sure 90% of anything might be crud, but what makes it crud? What distinguishes crud, and in this case crud ideas, be they ideas for books or ideas for films, and “good” ideas?
In the meantime it seems like the easy way out is to say
Like most things there is a potentially opposite sentiment expressed in a fragment attributed to the Philosopher Thales:
”A multitude of words is no proof of a prudent mind.”
″Prudent” here translated from “Phronimen”