<!-- TITLE: What are the laws of sociology? --> <!-- SUBTITLE: Are there such laws? --> + [conservation of complexity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_conservation_of_complexity). also [here](https://medium.com/@christhebrain/how-the-law-of-conservation-of-complexity-inhibits-business-growth-5da576727100) + 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs) + [size => differentiation](https://sethabrutyn.wordpress.com/2019/04/05/does-sociology-have-laws-spoiler-alert-yes-it-does/) (e.g. Durkheim) + Compte's lame-ass [law of three stages](https://www.britannica.com/topic/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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network), but [Benford's law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford's_law#:~:text=Benford's%20law,%20also%20called%20the,life%20sets%20of%20numerical%20data.&text=If%20the%20digits%20were%20distributed,about%2011.1%25%20of%20the%20time) "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."