Five laws of human nature

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."

Funniest line:

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

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

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.”