This required grant money to study? I’m not sure what the payoff is here. Or maybe it was simply that... a payoff.
If the article is going to claim that social networks have a huge influence on the mechanics of the game of naming, they should at least seek to explain how. All I got from the text was “We tried it and it just worked”.
This offer a more elaborate analysis in the original paper [1] which seems much more interesting than the article. And BTW, they mention they did not receive any funding :)
Fair enough. I made an assumption, most stuff gets funded by grants directly or indirectly.
On the paper note. Thanks for the link, couldn’t seem to find it... I was genuinely curious about how network theory changed the results, more than “made them better”
Not all research is going to pay off and it’s never going to be obvious ahead of time which research will lead to important discoveries.
I think if you’re funding research correctly you should be giving grant money to things that end up being a silly waste of time in retrospect.
Not that this was, necessarily, but in general giving grants to research that ends up being useless shouldn’t be considered a bad thing. It’s part of the cost of searching for new knowledge. Sometimes you’ll go down a dead end, but you still have to check there.
Is there more to it than why fashion comes and goes? Sadly I don't have access to the actual article to read beyond the abstract saying "some people don't want to follow the mold"
As someone in this process right now, my reasoning is more like this: remove "Adolf", remove all names that end with 'y' (local rule), remove all names already taken by close friends and colleagues (you wouldn't want them thinking you copied them), remove basically all names from your own generation because they remind you of people you went to school with, remove anything resembling a pornstar name, remove the names of your parents' generation because they remind you of... well, parents. Apply some ad hoc rules, e.g. only names with two syllables. What you're left with is usually well tested names from your grand parent's generation and back.
this is surprisingly close to the algorithm we used when naming our kids. Another important rule for us was that the name couldn't already be popular, but couldn't be really obscure either, a sweet spot where the name could potentially be popular in 10 or so years.
Yup, that was important to us as well for our first kid. And we actually ended up with a name we're very pleased with (and one that had never really crossed my mind before), something I honestly didn't think would be possible when we started.
My wife and I are working on names for our first child. Did you ever generate a list using your algorithm? We are trying to follow similar rules for our naming choice.
4. Go through the list slowly, say them out loud with the last name, and eliminate names you 100% know you won't choose. If you find yourself pausing on a name wondering if you should keep it, then keep it for now. Keep an open mind.
5. If a name sticks out, put a star by it.
6. When it starts getting too monotonous, then stop and pick it up later.
7. After you're done, randomize them again and make another pass.
8. Repeat until you have a small list, and share them with your partner.
Note: there are good names outside the top 1000, too.
Sorry no, we just used various apps and reduced the lists they provided manually. Usually the lists local to my country are only a thousand or so names long, so it's fairly quick work. I think that might be a bit more tedious for the US from what I've seen. There was an Android app posted here a while ago [1] that is clean and has over 100k names, which is a bit steep. But it also allows you to filter by decade, which might help reduce the scope somewhat.
My guideline was that the probability that they would share a class with someone with the same name was below some threshold. This kept things in perspective since "in the top x in popularity" wasn't very meaningful to me. And if it was on the high side, I wanted to see it trending away from popularity over the last decade.
> remove basically all names from your own generation because they remind you of people you went to school with, remove the names of your parents' generation because they remind you of... well, parents
I wonder if this is what happened to "Karen" since it had such a sharp drop-off decades before it became a slur. I can't think of a more "baby-boomer white woman" name, so it's a neat way for people to wrap their sexism, racism, and ageism up into a single easily-deniable word: https://www.behindthename.com/name/karen/top/united-states
Hmm. I was born at about peak Karen, and certainly did know some Karens in my elementary-school days. But even then, it didn't break 2%. Jennifer hit 4% some years later.
I thought the idea was to take an ordinary name, like "Bill", and replace the i's with y's to be edgy and hyp and curse your chyld with correctyng everyone who spelz yt wryng.
1a. Choose an unusual name, so that a large fraction of the children in day care two years hence will have the same name. Ask the Caitlyns who are now 32 about this.
2a. Choose a common name, so that a large fraction of the children in day care two years hence will have the same name, but nobody will be wondering why all these kids are named John or Edward.
A lot of this does depend on the last name. Nobody wants to be the twentieth "Mary Smith" in the room, but nobody wants to stand there spelling "Theophilus Schwarzenegger" every time they go to the dentist's office either.
An acquaintance of mine's name is Gregg. 2 g's. Imagine all the cumulative hours he spent correcting everyone's spelling of his name.
A student in college's last name was Hogg. But pronounced with a long o. I remember the prof calling on him, and his long suffering voice saying "it's Hoag".
Let me guess without reading the article: Names are considered high status, like Fitzwilliam or something, then the poor people start using them, then the high status people need to invent something new.
This come up a lot in writing fiction as even simple stories may require dozens of names. The push and pull between wanting to fit in and wanting to stand out is very strong and can be used to establish the identity and origins of a character. And it is often useful for contrast as characters with conservative origins and names may rebel and seek out their own path and even rename themselves while characters with radical origins and names often head out on a radical path on their own. Readers tend to infer a lot from names right from the start.
An interesting phenomenon to me is how male names get co-opted as female names -- and can later cause mild discomfort to the men who have the names. "Robin" and "Taylor" come to mind.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadIf the article is going to claim that social networks have a huge influence on the mechanics of the game of naming, they should at least seek to explain how. All I got from the text was “We tried it and it just worked”.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.13385
On the paper note. Thanks for the link, couldn’t seem to find it... I was genuinely curious about how network theory changed the results, more than “made them better”
I think if you’re funding research correctly you should be giving grant money to things that end up being a silly waste of time in retrospect.
Not that this was, necessarily, but in general giving grants to research that ends up being useless shouldn’t be considered a bad thing. It’s part of the cost of searching for new knowledge. Sometimes you’ll go down a dead end, but you still have to check there.
1. Get a list of the top 1000 names.
2. Remove the top x names.
3. Randomize the names.
4. Go through the list slowly, say them out loud with the last name, and eliminate names you 100% know you won't choose. If you find yourself pausing on a name wondering if you should keep it, then keep it for now. Keep an open mind.
5. If a name sticks out, put a star by it.
6. When it starts getting too monotonous, then stop and pick it up later.
7. After you're done, randomize them again and make another pass.
8. Repeat until you have a small list, and share them with your partner.
Note: there are good names outside the top 1000, too.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29118785
I wonder if this is what happened to "Karen" since it had such a sharp drop-off decades before it became a slur. I can't think of a more "baby-boomer white woman" name, so it's a neat way for people to wrap their sexism, racism, and ageism up into a single easily-deniable word: https://www.behindthename.com/name/karen/top/united-states
https://nametrends.net/name.php?name=Steven
Cathy
There was a time in my life where everyone I met seemed to be named Cathy.
1. choose an unusual name, so your child stands out, and can be found via google
2. choose a common name, so your child is invisible to google searches and has some anonymity
A student in college's last name was Hogg. But pronounced with a long o. I remember the prof calling on him, and his long suffering voice saying "it's Hoag".
Each ends with a hard "g", followed by a soft "g" (like Khashoggi is pronounced)