The Laws of Men

In the past few months I've seen numerous citations of Campbell's Law:

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."

Given current debates about high-stakes testing, NCLB, higher ed accountability, etc. the relevance to education policy is pretty obvious. David Berliner wrote a whole book flowing from this premise.

Campbell was a social scientist who, in declaring an eponymous, universal statute of sorts, joined a long tradition. The trick is to notice some interesting and fundamental relationship between important things, and explain it in a way that's memorable and easy to understand. Sometimes the observation is explicitly framed as a law, e.g. Godwin's Law: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

In other cases the observation is so inextricably tied with the observer that the effect is roughly the same, as with Acton on power and corruption or Santayana on remembrance and repitition of history. Getting your name attached to one these things is one road to minor immortality, albeit a particularly reductive kind.

The form is usually pretty similar: As X, Y. Or in slightly different form: As X, not Y. The historical examples people are trying to emulate, I suspect, are the ageless mathematicians and philosophers--Pythagoras, Archimedes, et al. Newton seemed to exlain the entire universe in three short laws of motion. That's why these laws are so popular. The world is a complicated place, more so all the time, and people are always hungry to accumulate a set of inviolable principles with which to make sense of things.

But here's the thing: just because someone makes an observation and calls it a law doesn't mean it's always true. I've heard people refer to Campbell's Law as if it were etched into the marble facade of the Supreme Court of Social Science, right up there with "correlation doesn't imply causation." It's not, nor are all the rest. Lots of people become powerful while avoiding corruption and make new history while remaining ignorant of the old. Heck, even Newton was eventually overtaken by quantum physics.

It'd be comforting if we could ascertain the world with nothing more than a few nostrums and easily remembered laws, but that's not the world we live in.