What are the laws of sociology?

• conservation of complexity. also here
• hunger rules the world (c.f. Gulag, Ch 7., ~18m on)
  • progressive doctrine of communism is based on the inevitable revolt of the hungry
  • darkens the brain, can't think about anything else
  • more generally, Maslow's hierarchy
• size => differentiation (e.g. Durkheim)
• Compte's lame-ass law of three stages -- theological, metaphysical, and positive
• Marx's analysis of Capital
• when everything is Machiavelian, it's predictable
• when the situation is constrained (e.g. games, traffic), it's predictable and reproducible, in aggregate
• Problably more general, and related to power laws, but Benford's law

"There are also three pure macrovariables: the dispersion of individuals in physical space; the amount of time that social processes take (including temporal patterns of intermit- tent and repeated behaviors); and the numbers of individuals involved. In other words, there are some irreducible macrofactors, but there is only a limited set of them." (Collins, Microfoundations, 989)

Human social activities are recursive
* "continually recreated via the very means by which they express themselves as actors" (Giddens, p2).

Taleb: The human mind suffers from three ailments as it comes into contact with history, what I call the triplet of opacity. They are:

• the illusion of understanding, or how everyone thinks he knows what is going on in a world that is more complicated (or random) than they realize;
• the retrospective distortion, or how we can assess matters only after the fact, as if they were in a rearview mirror (history seems clearer and more organized in history books than in empirical real­ ity); and
• the overvaluation of factual information and the handicap of authoritative and learned people, particularly when they create categories—when they "Platonify."