Harvard’s Ethan Fosse blogs about his top five unsolved sociological questions. Regardless of whether I agree that these particular ones are the “top five” (although I think all of them are interesting and relevant), I fully agree that making such lists is important. The lack of consensus about our main problems is one of the issues preventing progress in sociology, and open discussion about what we find important should bring us closer to such a consensus.
Having said that, I don’t really agree that Ehan’s number three ( Why do so many cultural and social phenomena … follow power-law distributions) should be in the top five, because it is not so clear that this is even true (e.g., see here). Also, I miss questions about social structure in the sense of social networks (obviously because I happen to study them :)). For example, to what extend is the social structure of modern societies changing under the influences of mass immigration and technological progress?
I’ve never really understood this argument about power laws. Is it just drawing distinctions among different types of over-dispersed count distributions or is it saying that these things don’t fall in that family at all? If it’s the former I still think it’s interesting that so many things look kind of like a power-law even if they don’t fit it perfectly and if it’s the latter I don’t see how that squares with the data since word counts, city sizes, sales of popular culture titles, etc, sure look at least kinda like power-laws to me.
Well I guess the most interesting thing about the power law-story was that so many otherwise wildly different phenomena appeared to have the same distribution. That would have been a truly remarkable regularity, but now it seems those distributions just kinda look the same (that is, over-dispersed). I don’t want to draw a line between “interesting” and “not interesting,” but to me at least that makes the whole thing less interesting.