laws of nature

was in the canteen today with a few of the lab folks, and the topic of conversation turned to whether sociology is, indeed, a load of bunk. this arising because none of the sociological studies we could think of could even pretend to have any explanatory power in the real world. for example, someone mentioned that her friend, for a senior thesis, wrote a qualititative description of the lives of transexuals in prison, in the hopes of showing that the common factor linking incarceration and the desire for a sex change is a need for rebellion against social norms; this argument would have been far more persuasive, of course, were it the case that the incidence of transexualism is higher in jails. it is, in fact, lower.

social sciences, fuzzy as they are, still ought to be grounded in scientific logic. i shudder when people talk about "descriptive science" (these people are, on the whole, lawyers). if i were a sociologist, i think i would study the multifarious corollaries of murphy's law, for instance, the inverse rule of glass-filling in restaurants, which states that how quickly your water glass is filled is inversely correlated with (a) how full your glass is, and (b) how badly you need the water. now that's something that can be quantified. i'd even make nice little scatter plots. hell, i'd probably be able to spin an entire phd out of it.