Sixty years or so ago, science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon got fed up with being asked why so much science fiction was so badly written. Rising to the defense of his field, he responded by saying it wasn’t actually any worse than any other. “Ninety percent of everything is crap,” he said.
It’s an adage now enthroned as Sturgeon’s Law. In any field you can name, the vast bulk of human endeavor is, at best, mediocre. The cream rises to the top, and, comparatively, there really isn’t a lot of it.
It’s an adage that might go along way toward explaining the sorry state of American politics—not because so much of what is said is crap, but because so few of us realize that this applies to both sides. Continue reading Sturgeon’s Law of Politics