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than others. From communication frequency alone, therefore, there is only so much one can infer about a given relationship. Nor is it even clear exactly which relationships we ought to care about in the first place. For some purposes, like understanding the efficiency of work-related teams, ties between coworkers might be the only ones that matter, whereas for other purposes, like understanding religious or political beliefs, work relationships might be far less relevant. To discover how a fast-moving rumor spreads, it may matter only with whom you have communicated in the past few days, whereas for information that can spread only through networks of trust, the ties that matter may be those that have persisted for years.25

There are many unresolved issues like these that currently limit our ability to draw meaningful sociological inferences from electronic data, no matter how much of it we can acquire. Sheer quantity on its own is certainly not a panacea. Nevertheless, the rapidly increasing availability of observational data, along with the ability to conduct experiments on a previously unimaginable scale, is allowing social scientists to imagine a world where at least some forms of collective human behavior can be measured and understood, possibly even predicted, in the way in which scientists in other fields have long been accustomed.

MESSY MATTERS

It isn’t clear where these new capabilities will lead social science, but it probably won’t be to the kind of simple universal laws that social theorists like Comte and Parsons dreamt of. Nor should it, for the simple reason that the social world probably isn’t governed by any such laws. Unlike gravity, which works the same way at all times and in all places, homophily originates partly out of psychological preferences and partly out of structural constraints. Unlike mass and acceleration, which are defined unambiguously, influence is sometimes concentrated and sometimes distributed, while success derives from a complicated mix of individual choices, social constraints, and random chance. Unlike physical forces, which can be neatly summed to determine their action on a mass, performance is driven by some complicated interaction between extrinsic incentives and intrinsic motivation. And unlike physical reality, which operates with or without us, there is no dissociating social “reality” from our perception of it, where perceptions are driven as much by our own psychological biases as by externally observable attributes.

The social world, in other words, is far messier than the physical world, and the more we learn about it, the messier it is likely to seem. The result is that we will probably never have a science of sociology that will resemble physics. But that’s OK. Just because physics has experienced such great success on the strength of a small number of very general laws doesn’t mean that that’s the only way for science to proceed. Biology doesn’t really have universal laws either, and yet biologists still manage to make progress. Surely the real nature of science is not to exhibit any particular form at all, but rather to follow scientific procedures—of theory, observation, and experiment—that incrementally and iteratively chip away at the mysteries of the world. And surely the point of these procedures is not to discover laws of any particular kind, but rather to figure things out—to solve problems. So the less we worry about looking for general laws in social science, and the more we worry about solving actual problems, the more progress we are likely to make.

But what kinds of problems can we hope to solve? More to the point—to return to the question that I raised in the Preface—what can social scientists hope to discover that an ordinary intelligent person couldn’t figure out on his or her own? Surely any thoughtful person could figure out just by introspection that we are all influenced by the opinions of our family and friends, that context matters, and that all things are relative. Surely such a person could know without the aid of social science that perceptions