Grand truths about human behavior

It’s more complicated than that.

Unintended consequences inevitably attend purposive social action. (Robert K. Merton)

“It is a principle that shines impartially on the just and the unjust that once you have a point of view all history will back you up.” (Van Wyck Brooks)

All the world is multivariate.

Much of the world is distributed lognormally.

People are different.

Rehearsal improves performance.

Effective intervention-thinking and choice-thinking necessarily require reasoning about comparisons, approximations, opportunity costs, and causality.

All grand theories, other than perhaps the scientific method, ultimately err (and some collapse) by overreaching. Another version: many good ideas ultimately over-reach and turn into bureaucratized rackets.

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” (Richard Feynman)

In explanations of human activities, both muddling through and incompetence are under-estimated, and both rational optimizing and conspiracy over-estimated.

Nearly all self-assessments claim above-average performance.

“The rage for wanting to conclude is one of the most deadly and most fruitless manias to befall humanity. Each religion and each philosophy has pretended to have God to itself, to measure the infinite, and to know the recipe for happiness. What arrogance and what nonsense! I see, to the contrary, that the greatest geniuses and the greatest works have never concluded.” (Gustave Flaubert)

“Upon expecting fair play in high places: You’ll get it if enough folk are watching.” ( J. P. Donleavy’s variant of Wendell Phillips’ “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”)

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Perhaps our Kindly Contributors will have other Grand Truths about human behavior in the spirit of the material posted above—ideas with a reasonable empirical base that serve to help describe and understand human behavior.