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Sturgeon's Law vs. Infinite Monkeys
Apr. 2nd, 2011 09:24 pmFamously, Sturgeon's Law says that 90% of everything is crap. It's pretty much true. It too is crap: not because it is wrong, but because it is irrelevant.
Sturgeon extrapolated from his personal experience as a sci-fi author back in the days of paper books, and yes, there's a lot of really crap pulp in that field. It doesn't take much cynicism to extrapolate it to the rest of the world: most gadgets are crap, most food is crap, most politics is crap, and so on.
But that only applies in a resource-scarce environment. Now behold the Infinite, my cynical reader. It's not got better (90% of twitpics are photos of your lunch), but it's got so impossibly massive that whatever you think is great, there's more of it than you can possibly consume. An infinite library has infinite awesomeness: it just needs to be tapped. Of course, 90% of tapping methods are crap, but personal recommendations are usually weighted pretty well, which is why I'll read a retweeted webcomic and usually like it and catass my weekend away reading all the catch-up.
The infinite monkeys win, because any percentage of infinite is infinite, and I only need a hundred years of good stuff before I die.
(Yes, this post is an excuse for doing nothing on a lovely day, thinly veiled as singularitarian Better Than Life propaganda. But you should read Jesus Christ: In The Name Of The Gun. There are far too many HFS needle-peggers for me to spoil it. Go. Read. See? Told you.)
As a postscript, I have real trouble mourning libraries when they are so obviously obsolete. There, I've said it. I loved libraries too. I have a penny farthing bike. It's a lousy ride.
Sturgeon extrapolated from his personal experience as a sci-fi author back in the days of paper books, and yes, there's a lot of really crap pulp in that field. It doesn't take much cynicism to extrapolate it to the rest of the world: most gadgets are crap, most food is crap, most politics is crap, and so on.
But that only applies in a resource-scarce environment. Now behold the Infinite, my cynical reader. It's not got better (90% of twitpics are photos of your lunch), but it's got so impossibly massive that whatever you think is great, there's more of it than you can possibly consume. An infinite library has infinite awesomeness: it just needs to be tapped. Of course, 90% of tapping methods are crap, but personal recommendations are usually weighted pretty well, which is why I'll read a retweeted webcomic and usually like it and catass my weekend away reading all the catch-up.
The infinite monkeys win, because any percentage of infinite is infinite, and I only need a hundred years of good stuff before I die.
(Yes, this post is an excuse for doing nothing on a lovely day, thinly veiled as singularitarian Better Than Life propaganda. But you should read Jesus Christ: In The Name Of The Gun. There are far too many HFS needle-peggers for me to spoil it. Go. Read. See? Told you.)
As a postscript, I have real trouble mourning libraries when they are so obviously obsolete. There, I've said it. I loved libraries too. I have a penny farthing bike. It's a lousy ride.
