Five laws of human nature

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18301-five-laws-of-human-nature.html

by robg • 17 years ago

37 17 17 years ago

aneil• 17 years ago

I think we can safely toss out Sayres Law (the "intensity" of academic squabbles [is] a function of the "triviality" of the issue at hand):

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/18/nyregion/education-lessons... "In government, people know how to disagree gracefully, and you never scorch the earth because you know that today's opponent is someone with whom you may have to make common agreement tomorrow," said Donald Kennedy, the president of Stanford and a former Commmissioner of the Federal Food and Drug Administration. "Academics find it difficult to have disagreement without alienation."

Psyonic• 17 years ago

I have a feeling that graceful disagreement isn't working so well in politics lately. Shouting "Liar!" at the President is just one of many examples.

ars• 17 years ago

Sayres Law is a variant of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikeshed

hegemonicon• 17 years ago

I guess 'five behaviors that people sometimes exhibit, some of the time' wasn't a punchy enough title.

msg• 17 years ago

Funniest line:

"First proposed by Bruce Salem on the discussion site Usenet..."

blhack• 17 years ago

Did anyone else get the notification that newscientist is about to start charing for articles?

This was one of my favorite websites, but I doubt I'll actually subscribe to it. I might pick up a dead-tree copy at barnes and noble every once in a while; maybe that was their intention?

/sorry for the threadjack.

rauljara• 17 years ago

More like five tendencies of human nature. The author even points out exceptions to some of the "laws" he's righting about.

jacobolus• 17 years ago

How are these relevant to each-other? What's the purpose of this article? If we’re just making an arbitrary list, there are hundreds of similar phenomena we could include. These five certainly aren’t exhaustive, and they don’t strike me as representative either.

This article seems more like: “We have x column inches to fill about human behavior. Here are n unrelated phenomena which we noticed some not-so-recent papers about before our deadline rolled around, and we managed to fill that space with them.”

est• 17 years ago

> Salem hypothesis

As a non-western culture person, why is so important to be ranked as one of the five laws of human nature ?

----------------------------------

About the whole article:

I was expecting some universal and fundamental laws, but at last I think this article covers only a minor aspect of predictable human nature in a modern society.

fnid• 17 years ago

I don't know why that's in there. I see no evidence for it, either in the article or anecdotally around me in the real world.

slackerIII• 17 years ago

Is the combination of Parkinson's Law with Maes-Garreau Law the reason we don't have AI yet?

jpwagner• 17 years ago

No actually, it's all student syndrome :P

zackattack• 17 years ago

Am I the only one who actually liked the article, and feels no need to nitpick semantics?

Parkinson's Law and Student Syndrome are especially valuable.. if you want to be productive, work within the constraints of human nature to optimize your productivity and happiness.

sliceghost• 17 years ago

Odd: "engineers are more likely to be religious than other graduates"

jamesbritt• 17 years ago

Do they pray more before final exams?

timwiseman• 17 years ago

I tend to.

Five laws of human nature

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