"The principle of Sturgeon's Razor states that the simplest answer to any problem is 90% crap"
About this Quote
Aaron Allston takes a nerd-folk law of the internet age and flips it into a writer's grim little truth: the world is awash in easy answers, and most of them are junk. He's riffing on Sturgeon's Law ("ninety percent of everything is crap") while mock-parodying Occam's Razor, the prized philosophical tool that tells us to prefer the simplest explanation. By stapling those two ideas together, he punctures our cultural addiction to tidy takes. The line is funny because it looks like wisdom and behaves like a warning.
The intent is less to argue against simplicity than to shame our reflexive trust in it. "Simplest answer" is a phrase that usually signals clarity and competence; Allston reveals how often it really signals laziness, groupthink, or the comforting buzz of certainty. The 90% figure is deliberately blunt, not statistical. It's a comedic cudgel that says: your first draft of understanding is probably just a draft - and a bad one.
Context matters: Allston worked in genre fiction and shared DNA with fan communities where theories, lore explanations, and hot takes multiply fast. In those ecosystems, neat solutions thrive because they travel well: short, quotable, confidently wrong. The subtext is a craft note dressed up as philosophy. Good answers, like good stories, cost time. The cleanest explanation isn't the enemy; the cheap explanation is.
The intent is less to argue against simplicity than to shame our reflexive trust in it. "Simplest answer" is a phrase that usually signals clarity and competence; Allston reveals how often it really signals laziness, groupthink, or the comforting buzz of certainty. The 90% figure is deliberately blunt, not statistical. It's a comedic cudgel that says: your first draft of understanding is probably just a draft - and a bad one.
Context matters: Allston worked in genre fiction and shared DNA with fan communities where theories, lore explanations, and hot takes multiply fast. In those ecosystems, neat solutions thrive because they travel well: short, quotable, confidently wrong. The subtext is a craft note dressed up as philosophy. Good answers, like good stories, cost time. The cleanest explanation isn't the enemy; the cheap explanation is.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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