90 percent of everything is crap | Hacker News Reader

90 percent of everything is crap

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112 pointsvincent_s62 comments

Having 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.

How good human life is for those who won the birth lottery. Everyone else gets to enjoy the mountain of crap.

Beautiful comment

Whats 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.

More 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.

Heck, sometimes I'm amazed that when I turn on my computer it does anything at all with all the complexity going on inside it

That's primarily because the biological organisms don't want to die, end up in hospital, get sued, etc. =) Those are powerful motivations.

A few days ago someone here said something like "design things to work even when things are broken."

I'm guessing humans have evolved to "work" even when our uniquely intelligent brains combine with our opposable thumbs to fuck things up.

Any intelligent species can make a mistake, but it takes a human to really fuck things up.

Good point. However, I think the miracle is exchanged for another one if you believe that civilization was built not on a mountain of crap, but through the efforts of the few who put true rigor into their contributions. Science, philosophy, art, politics, religion and so on have been developed by a relatively minuscule handful of individuals throughout the ages. These greats have built us the walls of civilization which have been filled with crap from within. In my opinion civilization is not built upon a mountain of crap, but is the very walls keeping the crap in place. That these walls are strong enough is the true miracle.

"civilization is not built upon a mountain of crap, but is the very walls keeping the crap in place" is my new favorite sentence.

I find it hard to reconcile that view with the historical examples. For example, assuming you agree that Newton made such contributions, how do you fit his thirty-year dabble in alchemy with the concept that such individuals put "true rigour" in their works?

I have confidence in the rigor of Newton's alchemy.

"Yep, this doesn't work."

A handful of people invented the internal combustion engine, but thousands of engineers and hundreds of thousands of factory workers and mechanics, of various shades of competence, designed and built the actual engine in your car.

A handful of singular individuals penned the broad outlines of our Constitutional structure, but it's the masses of people that built the system and keep it running. The difference between say Bangladesh and the United States is not the ingenuity of their respective founding documents, but the file clerk at the American courthouse who wouldn't even think of taking a bribe, versus his counterpart.

Big ideas mean nothing without execution, and it's the plebes that do the execution. Every great endeavor lives and dies by the virtue of the rank-and-file people undertaking it.

Word. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/world/asia/bangladesh-cour...

"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.

“Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” - Ron Swanson

"If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." - G.K. Chesterton.

Nice quote, but that's not what Chesterton meant.

Chesterton had great respect for the wisdom of the common men. He believed that the matters most important to society as a whole should not be left in the hands of mere experts.

What's not what Chesterton meant?

"But I was using my whole ass!" -- Homer Simpson

"Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is never try." ~ Homer Simpson

Very 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.

So 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".

So, of the remaining 10% which is not crap, 90% of that is crap.

Following this logic, everything is crap, which seems about right.

Following this logic, everything is crap and turing complete

Crapturtles all the way down.

Zeno's crapadox.

Theoretically, 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!

My 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.

Reminds me of the half life of knowledge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge

The 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.

Is 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.

Sturgeon 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.

Absolutely. 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.

That'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.

"The Girl Had Guts" was apparently "embraced" almost shot-for-shot into Alien. Amazing short story.

With cheap paper-back publishing, blogs and now social media. modern copy-paste, citation-compiling "science", the percentage is approaching a hundred.

I 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.

90 percent of the internet is javascript

90% 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.

Yes, but it's crap of a higher quality than Reddit, and that's what matters. Hacker News is the crap of the crop.

Might I dare to childishly call your handle suitable without you being offended?

Might as well, people have been doing that for years.

edit: and asking me what the frequency is.

A longer exposition on the concept, at ribbonfarm...

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/03/12/the-art-of-agile-leader...

tl;dr: fate of civilization rests on .1% of our effort...

Can this law be applied to itself?

It's not a law in the strict sense.

Crappy law then?

There's a 90% chance this law is bs.

But that's just the prior, isn't it? What's the full Bayesian picture?

You 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.

> 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.

Perhaps 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.

90% is really generous

So 90% of the comments you are reading here are crap...

I always apply the 80/20 rule to everything, so I'd say 80 instead of 90 but I certainly understand the sentiment.

100% of excrement is crap. Therefore this law is false.

Isn't most of it water?

Isn't water the best stuff on earth? So crap isn't even crap anymore.

90% of it is also crap, though, so the law is still true.

"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]

It's not crap; It's irrelevant for you;

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