[HN Gopher] An abundance of Katherines: The game theory of baby ...
___________________________________________________________________
An abundance of Katherines: The game theory of baby naming
Author : cipcoder
Score : 236 points
Date : 2024-07-10 22:08 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| matthewmcg wrote:
| Author listing: Katy Blumer, Kate Donahue, Katie Fritz, Kate
| Ivanovich, Katherine Lee, Katie Luo, Cathy Meng, Katie Van
| Koevering
|
| For people unfamiliar with common English names, all of the
| authors have first names similar to or derived from Katherine.
| ukuina wrote:
| I think that is the meta-joke.
| evanb wrote:
| See also:
|
| A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Authors, by Goodman,
| Goodman, Goodman, and Goodman
| https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/joshuagoodman/files/goodma...
|
| (Para)bosons, (para)fermions, quons and other beasts in the
| menagerie of particle statistics, by O.W. Greenberg, D.M
| Greenberger, T.V. Greenbergest https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-
| ph/9306225 [Wally Greenberg told me that T.V. stands for 'the
| very']
|
| Also note that TFA is a 1 April posting.
| bonzini wrote:
| It's SIGBOVIK, so that's the kind of content you'd expect
| independent of the date.
| ale42 wrote:
| Actual research paper about the influence of a name on
| career and other "major life decisions":
|
| * Why Susie sells seashells by the seashore: implicit
| egotism and major life decisions
| (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11999918/)
|
| With follow-ups:
|
| * I sell seashells by the seashore and my name is Jack:
| comment on Pelham, Mirenberg, and Jones (2002)
| (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14599244/)
|
| * Assessing the validity of implicit egotism: a reply to
| Gallucci (2003) (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14599245/)
| gattr wrote:
| On a related note:
|
| C. Limb, R. Limb, C. Limb, D. Limb "Nominative determinism in
| hospital medicine: Can our surnames influence our choice of
| career, and even specialty?"
|
| https://publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.1308/147363515X14.
| ..
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| I personally know a "Doctor Coffin" (coughing & coffin) as
| well as a Doctor Payne.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| This reminds me that I went to nautical school with someone
| whose last name was Schiff (German for ship) and he said
| that was exactly the reason he chose to go to sea. Also
| remember someone a year ahead of us whose name was Dory (a
| small rowboat).
| dbcurtis wrote:
| In the small rural county where I grew up, the 1/2-time job
| of county prosecuting attorney was named Lynch. I am not
| making this up.
| slyall wrote:
| A few years ago there was KatieConf. Intended to highlight the
| lack of Women speakers at tech conferences
|
| https://2019.katieconf.xyz/
| drewry wrote:
| Hah this reminds me of a site I built for April 1, 2019
| http://www.mynamecon.com
| mbg721 wrote:
| I saw an ad once for a convention of Bobs, with a keynote
| speech from Bob Newhart and the Jamaican bobsled team as
| special guests.
| stordoff wrote:
| I'm reminded of the 'Tom Formal' that took place whilst I was
| at university:
|
| > Last night, February 3rd 2011, saw 100 students and fellows
| all sharing the name of Tom, gather together in a record-
| breaking charity event in Sidney Sussex dining hall. [...]
| For PS20, Cambridge students with the name "Tom, Thomas,
| Tommy (or another legitimate variation)" were able to attend
| a black-tie, three-course formal dinner
|
| https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/3192
| dabiged wrote:
| The best bit: They recursively reference the paper to provide
| proof that too many parents choose the same common names:
|
| > For instance, a parent might anticipate the name "Kate" would
| be a pleasantly traditional yet unique name with only moderate
| popularity. They would be wrong [6].
|
| Reference 6 is the paper.
| martypitt wrote:
| Also good...
|
| > Simon Shindler contributed significantly to the aesthetic
| of Figure 7, but could not be named an author for obvious
| reasons.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Simon Shindler contributed significantly to the aesthetic
| of Figure 7, but could not be named an author for obvious
| reasons.
|
| What are these "obvious reasons"?
| jsjohnst wrote:
| Their first name isn't derived from Katherine. ;)
| byteknight wrote:
| Kay is derived from Kate. Kate is Derived from Kathy or
| Katherine.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Nicknames satisfy the transitive property.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| The reason was that his first name doesn't satisfy the
| regex /^[KC]at(h?ie|e|h?y|h?erine)$/
| adolph wrote:
| While that does work for the people listed as author, it
| does miss Katherine derivative "Kay."
| jsjohnst wrote:
| /^[KC]a(t(h?ie|e|h?y|h?erine)?|y)?$/
| lostlogin wrote:
| It gets worse - there are some obscure ones. Eg Reina,
| Kaja, Katarzyna, Aikaterine.
|
| https://nameberry.com/list/16/catherinekatherines-
| internatio...
| o11c wrote:
| Sketch of a more complete solution, excluding shortened
| forms and very foreign ones. Alternatives are in rough
| order of frequency.
|
| vowel 0: E, Ye, Je, Ai. Optional and rare; Ai in
| particular is very rare.
|
| consonant 1: C, K, G, Q. Mandatory; G and Q are rare.
|
| vowel 1: a, aa, ai; optional h or gh. Mandatory. A few
| shortened forms use i instead.
|
| consonant 2: t, tt, d. Almost mandatory, but a few
| r-centric variants lack it. There also seem to be a few
|
| vowel 2: a, e. Optional, only valid if consonant 2
| exists. In shortened forms, also i, ie, or y; this is the
| end.
|
| consonant 3: r, l. Optional. Sometimes L starts a new
| word instead.
|
| vowel 3: i, y, ee, ie, ii, e if no consonant 2, plus
| several rare vowel sequences. Almost mandatory (assuming
| consonant 3), but a few rare variants pack the r right
| next to the n.
|
| consonant 4: n, nn, nh. Optional.
|
| vowel 4: e, a, ey. Optional; ey is rare.
|
| Some languages shove an s, c, x, t, k somewhere too (some
| of these are probably language-specific diminutives, but
| a few might be phoneme drift instead) ...
|
| "Kaylee" and its variant "Kayla" should probably not be
| counted (despite almost fitting the pattern) since that's
| a compound of "Kay", adding the additional "Leigh" name.
| martypitt wrote:
| Like the author said... Obvious. :)
| devsda wrote:
| It goes beyond that. Three of the authors have east-asian
| last names.
|
| I understand that many people from east asia have a given
| name in their native language and an english sounding name
| that they often choose themselves.
|
| If those three authors did chose their english names, then
| they too fall into the same category of parents who chose a
| variation of Katherine.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| I hope they did not perish immediately after choosing their
| names, as assumed in the paper.
| bee_rider wrote:
| If they did indeed pick those names while traveling to the
| US, possibly as adults, I think they'd actually really
| interesting cases. They'd be choosing names later than
| their peers, so they could see how the name game played out
| for their peers. Of course, they could also be peers of the
| parents of the other authors.
|
| I've also met some folks who had English names that
| phonetically sounded similar to their original names. I
| wonder if there's an east Asian first name that sounds like
| any of the versions of Katherine.
| burnished wrote:
| From my anecdotal experience origin is a big factor: of
| adults I have known to choose a name for themselves
| americans overwhelmingly pick unusual or ornamented
| names, whereas the other group (typically asian, first
| language has a different set of basic sounds) pick
| stereotypically common and plain/short names. I don't
| really know anyones specific thought process on the
| matter though, maybe I'll have to start asking for
| curiosities sake.
| well_actulily wrote:
| This phenomena also occurs in the transgender community;
| people put a lot of thought and intention choosing their
| new names only to wind up surrounded by other people who
| _also_ landed on the same name, often for similar reasons.
| There 's even a whole subreddit specifically for
| transfeminine people who are named some variation of Lily:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/LilyIsTrans/
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Are all the trans men still naming themselves Aidan?
| yamazakiwi wrote:
| Recently I've met more Ashe's than Aidan's
| alickz wrote:
| at least they're not a
| https://old.reddit.com/r/tragedeigh/
| DowagerDave wrote:
| Not sure it's still the same scenario with today's far more
| connected world, but even 20 years ago you could guess with
| some accuracy that someone was east-Asian from their
| "English" name being ~50 years out of date, popularity
| wise.
| adolph wrote:
| Is it paradoxical that family names (used by a group of people)
| are more differentiated than personal names (used by one
| person)?
| burnished wrote:
| I think that makes sense both from an organizational and
| cultural perspective. Context usually supplies whatever
| information is needed for personal names so less
| disambiguation is required, and they are used much more so
| some simplicity is useful/natural consequence of human
| nature. Family names are used less frequently and with less
| context and frankly is how people distinguish their group
| from others. So yeah, think it checks out.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I'd assume that this is more likely true in countries mostly
| populated by recent immigrants.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| I began wondering if "Katerina" (often shortened to "Kat") was
| related, the etymology I found here
| https://www.behindthename.com/name/katherine is interesting.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I expect for a lot of parents naming a baby, the _actual_
| etymology is less important than whether the name sounds
| related /derived.
| AceyMan wrote:
| This _is_ the catch: you 're not naming a baby: you're
| naming _a person_ ; they just so happen to be a baby at the
| beginning when you're enjoying an early appreciation for
| the mel lif lu ous ness of the name ... but they're going
| to be an adult the vast majority of their life. Ergo, that
| ought to be the usage parents plan for, rather than some
| cute, endearing name "fitting" for an infant (for some
| definition of fitting).
| mikepurvis wrote:
| In most cases where babies get a "cutesy" name, hopefully
| the parents have the self-awareness to give them the
| corresponding adult version as their legal name, or _at
| least_ a reasonable alternative as a middle name-- both
| give the person easier options if they want to change it
| up during life transitions like entering high school or
| going away to university.
|
| For example, Gwyneth Paltrow's daughter is Apple Blythe
| Alison Martin, and she's stuck with it, being Apple
| Martin professionally-- but it's good she had the off-
| ramp to be the much more conventional Blythe or Alison if
| she'd wanted it.
| srndsnd wrote:
| The title of the paper is also a reference to the famous YA
| novel "An Abundance of Katherines" by John Green.
| xyst wrote:
| Glad to know I am not the only person to notice this :)
|
| I wonder how all of these people met and decided to collaborate
| on this paper.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Through making several Extremely Reasonable Assumptions
| (namely, that parents are myopic, perfectly knowledgeable agents
| who pick a name based solely on its "uniqueness")
|
| What a weird assumption. We named our daughter picking four
| names, starting respectively with the letters 'G', 'A', 'T' and
| 'C'.
| Taniwha wrote:
| Yeah, I was thinking the same thing - as a 1st time new parent
| you're famously not well plugged into the names currently being
| chosen by other parents, which is why our son Max was one of 3
| in his class
| magneticnorth wrote:
| I believe the authors, Katy Blumer, Kate Donahue, Katie
| Fritz, Kate Ivanovich, Katherine Lee, Katie Luo, Cathy Meng,
| Katie Van Koevering,
|
| may have had a similar experience to your son.
| Symbiote wrote:
| I have only now realised the reason my name is fairly unique.
|
| My father was a teacher, so he did know names people were
| using, and for any given name could probably think of a child
| he wouldn't want me to share a name with!
| technothrasher wrote:
| I definitely looked up what names people were naming their
| kids when choosing my kid's name. It allowed me to pick one
| that was not so unusual as to be seen as weird, but wasn't
| going to clash with everybody else out there either. It
| worked. He occasionally meets others with his name, but not
| very often. The only issue is that his name has about five
| different common spellings.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| My name is Michael and I definitely used this data because
| I didn't want my kids to have very common names. As it
| turns out, the first person to compile this data in the US
| was an actuary for the Social Security Administration, also
| named Michael, who was trying to name his kid and wanted to
| know what the most common names were so that his kids
| wouldn't have names that were too common:
| https://nameberry.com/blog/most-popular-names-how-the-
| list-w...
| butlike wrote:
| As a currently (but ideally not permanently so) childless
| adult...what does it matter what the other parents are naming
| their babies?
|
| btw and fwiw, Max is a good name.
| p1esk wrote:
| You do realize they are just having fun in that paper, right?
| taberiand wrote:
| I think this person is also having fun - suggesting they
| would name their kids by following a genetic sequence
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| But sticking to the familiar crowd-pleasing members of that
| sequence to make the joke stick, knowing that even on this
| site working in poor neglected uracil would be trying too
| hard
| nvy wrote:
| All my homies hate uracil
| genter wrote:
| It's dry humor. The article is soaked in it.
| erickj wrote:
| Did you name her Adenine?
| mbil wrote:
| Had a number of sensible chuckles...
|
| > Because this paper was written in 2024, we include an
| obligatory section involving generative AI and LLMs.
|
| > Another ERA is the Mayfly Parenthood Assumption, in which all
| parents perish immediately upon naming their child, which makes
| the math substantially easier.
|
| > It is well-known that parents are always in complete agreement
| over the name they would prefer to pick for their newborn child.
| jacinda wrote:
| Also the dinosaur and squid-shaped distribution graphs made me
| smile.
| nimish wrote:
| More graphs need animal motifs.
| defrost wrote:
| _Danger 5_ was simply the best. https://imgur.com/P80uqLB
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| SIaU...
|
| (and I appreciate how every so often the subtitles in D5 are
| off)
| dabiged wrote:
| > We baselessly claim a log-normal makes sense...
|
| I personally loved the semi cropped ChatGPT screen shot in
| figure 8 that has "Can you write me a paper on the game theory
| of names".
| greenyoda wrote:
| Reference [12] suggests that the title of the paper was inspired
| by a previous work:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Abundance_of_Katherines
|
| (Also, the submission date, 31 Mar 2024, suggests that the paper
| was intended to be published on April Fools Day.)
| worstspotgain wrote:
| I was going to name my child Seven, Mickey Mantle's number, a
| great name for a boy or a girl. Then some friends overheard it
| and stole it for their baby.
| _sys49152 wrote:
| youre doing a seinfeld bit right?
|
| season 7 ep 13
| worstspotgain wrote:
| Took you two whole minutes, I'll have to pick something more
| obscure next time.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| This is kind of depressing: every time I make a somewhat-
| obscure sci-fi reference here, usually no one gets it (or
| it takes a very long time). But an obscure Seinfeld
| reference gets a full citation in 2 minutes.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Nothing Seinfeld is obscure.
| neerajk wrote:
| Exactly. And if you don't say seven in the emphatic
| manner George says it who are you.
| thih9 wrote:
| If it helps, my first thought was Seven of Nine[1].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_of_Nine
| elzbardico wrote:
| In my whole life I was able to watch 20 minutes of
| Seinfeld. I feel that i must be an exceedingly weird
| person to find it absurdly boring and depressing when
| almost everyone loves it.
| francisofascii wrote:
| My first thought was the Voyager character called "Seven" (or
| Seven of Nine) played by Teri Ryan.
| butlike wrote:
| "Seven, Mickey Mantle's number, a great name for a boy or a
| girl" you get over here right now, ya hear?!
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| The idiot child from "Married with Children" who was eventually
| abandoned on a street corner when they got tired of him?
| mostertoaster wrote:
| I think wait but why really nailed the theory of baby naming -
| https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/how-to-name-baby.html
| benatkin wrote:
| In case anyone else was wondering, no, it isn't _why
| https://viewsourcecode.org/why/
| thriftwy wrote:
| I think it is a misconception that some baby name is boring.
|
| Nothing is less boring than a name embraced by a small
| energetic human confident that's who they are.
|
| I imagine you might want a funky name for a toy to convinve
| yourself - that is a total non-issue for children.
| mostertoaster wrote:
| Yeah I chose "boring" names for my kids.
|
| I do think the best names are ones with the most meaning.
|
| You name a kid Isaac, you could be naming him after Isaac
| Newton. It puts something on to him.
|
| If you name a kid William, maybe you hope he will be the next
| Shakespeare.
|
| Simply by naming someone something, you imprint something on
| to them. The history and power of a culture.
|
| Yet for this very reason, especially when people see the
| culture as dark, they choose unique names, names that say you
| can be who you want to be.
|
| Though I think I still prefer old names, looking at names of
| people who have done something, and then hoping to do
| something similar.
|
| I think this is kind of why a convert to an orthodox
| Christianity, from some heterodoxy, or atheism, or from the
| religion of the "infadels" takes a new name in baptism. They
| hope to live up to whomever. If you take the name Theresa at
| baptism with a sense of obligation to love the lowly like
| Mother Theresa and so on.
|
| Wonder if other religions do similar things?
| scherlock wrote:
| I named my kid Dexter. Despite my best efforts he won't
| wear lab coats or speak with an accent. When I try he just
| asks me to go buy some plastic drop cloths and goes back to
| sharpening the kitchen knives.
| throwup238 wrote:
| You always have to name the sister first, otherwise it's
| a Schroedinger's Dexter that never turns out the way you
| expected.
| drivers99 wrote:
| > You name a kid Isaac, you could be naming him after Isaac
| Newton. It puts something on to him.
|
| My son's name. I was thinking of Isaac Asimov and I had
| Isaac Newton in mind as well. I know an SF writer who I
| worked with who named his sons Arthur and Robert, after
| famous SF writers obviously in his case.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Everyone else is thinking you named your kid after the
| first guy to get circumcised, whose father Abraham almost
| sacrificed him
| jollyllama wrote:
| From Freakonomics: [0]
|
| >LEVITT: Yeah, one of the most predictable patterns when it
| comes to names is that almost every name that becomes popular
| starts out as a high-class name or a high-education name. So in
| these California data we had we could see the education level
| of the parents. And even the names that eventually become the,
| quote, "trashiest" kinds of names, so the Tiffanys and the
| Brittanys, and I'll probably get myself in trouble, and the
| Caitlyns and things like that start at the top of the income
| distribution, and over the course of 20 or 30 or 40 years they
| migrate their way down, becoming more and more popular among
| the less-educated set.
|
| What you see with Mabel in the paper is a fad name coming back.
| Hipsters bring it back, then upper class parents with hipster
| pretentions popularize it, then it spreads to the general
| population. The trick is to pick a name that sounds outdated or
| obscure but will come into popularity within the child's
| lifetime. If you wanted to do that now, you would pick
| something like Linda or Iris.
|
| I would also be interested to see analysis on syllable counts.
| When will the boomer 2 syllable names will come back into
| style?
|
| [0] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-much-does-your-name-
| mat...
| shagie wrote:
| I worked with a Harrison (born in the 70s) who commented that
| the name had a bathtub curve - most people with the name were
| either really old or really young (he knew more Harrisons in
| his toddler's preschool class than his own age).
|
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Harrison&assumption=%7B.
| ..
|
| Compare with a name like Michael (
| https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Michael ), which while
| it has fallen out of favor with newer names, is _still_ the
| most common male name in the population - though the average
| age is 48 years.
|
| https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/names1970s.html
|
| And yes, I went to school with seven Jennifers _on that bus
| route_ (there were more on other bus routes).
| https://youtu.be/1nN_5kkYR6k
| ghaff wrote:
| I've always found it somewhat amusing that, at least for my
| age range, I have a given name that's not unique or
| obviously weird but pretty uncommon. At the last place I
| worked, that was guaranteed to--on the odd conference call
| --have one of the two of us sharing a given name
| periodically be "Why the hell is someone asking me about
| $THING_I_KNOW_NOTHING_ABOUT ?" While both my first and last
| names are northern European, they are also from different
| countries so as far as I know I'm unique among living
| people with an Internet presence which is presumably better
| than sharing a name with someone who is widely hated for
| some reason or other.
| themadturk wrote:
| My first thought is that children born in the 70s named
| "Harrison" owe their names to Harrison Ford, at that time
| wildly popular for Star Wars and Indiana Jones. "Mabel" may
| owe some popularity thanks to Selena Gomez's character in
| "Only Murders In The Building."
| shagie wrote:
| This Harrison was early 70s rather than late 70s, though
| Harrison Ford was still a known name back then.
|
| Still, Harrison wasn't even in the top 200 names in the
| 70s. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/names1970
| s.html
|
| Compare with 136 in the 2010s. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/b
| abynames/decades/names2010s.html
|
| One of the things to take note of between those two
| charts is that the most popular names are _less_ popular.
| Parents are choosing distinctive names rather than common
| names.
|
| In 1970, the top five male names represent 2.5 million
| births. Michael (the most common name) was 707,377 of
| them.
|
| In 2010, the most common name was Noah with 183,258
| births. In 1970, a name with that much popularity would
| be #20.5 between Thomas and Timmothy.
|
| That 2.5 million again... in 2010s that's 19 names.
|
| ... Another visualization of the data.
| https://namerology.com/baby-name-grapher/ This looks at
| the top 200 names for boys and girls over time. However,
| the downward slope isn't fewer overall births but rather
| the reduction of popularity of the most common names.
|
| And another visualization of the data - The Evolution of
| US Boy Names: Bubbled https://youtu.be/WQv99sEPDsw and
| Girl Names: https://youtu.be/qVh2Qw5KSFg
|
| The thing to watch in those is the size of the largest
| bubbles. The 2014 bubbles look fundamentally different
| than the 1974 bubbles.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| 35 years ago I knocked up my soon to be wife. We picked out name
| and opted for a home birth, confident that no other couples had
| made those same choices.
|
| That birth month, Life magazine featured a full page spread of a
| home birth (ewwww); their newborn had the same name.
|
| This event is on a list of stuff I/we came to on our own, at the
| same time as everyone else.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> This event is on a list of stuff I/we came to on our own, at
| the same time as everyone else.
|
| I'm finding that phenomenon to be rather common. Seems like a
| bunch of other people are reaching the same conclusion...
| ghaff wrote:
| Most of us like to believe that we're not slaves to fashion
| but we often are.
|
| One of my favorite examples (although there are many) is
| inline skating/rollerblading. It was all the rage in the
| early 90s or so. It's _rare_ to see someone rollerblading
| today. I pick that example because it was somewhat related to
| tech that it took off. But there 's no good reason for it to
| have pretty much died off.
| lesuorac wrote:
| The amusing part about inline skating is that when you go
| by kids they're look "wow look at that guy skating". And
| then they never skate themselves.
|
| I suspect there's a few issues
|
| - If your parents don't skate you'll probably never get
| competent at it
|
| - You need to be actually good to not injure yourself or on
| a pretty flat area. Rollerblades do not handle holes in
| pavement nearly as well as bicycles or shoes.
|
| - Bicycles have actual utility like getting to work/places.
| For Covid a ton of people bought skates [1] but honestly I
| never saw that many more people skating then compared to
| before/after.
|
| - They're pretty bulky. A Bicycle can transport and lock
| itself up but if you skate somewhere you'll need a bag to
| store them.
|
| [1]:
| https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/29078390/rollerblade-
| ren...
| ghaff wrote:
| I played ice hockey through college and beyond so
| rollerblading was pretty straightforward modulo rough
| surfaces and pavement that isn't flat. But I sort of
| agree. Even though it was popular at one point, it's
| something that has a learning curve for someone who
| hasn't, often painfully, learned activities that provide
| an on-ramp. Not that I became an expert but picking up
| inline skating as an adult was pretty easy for me.
|
| And, yeah, it isn't an activity that has any real
| utility. I don't really bike (didn't learn as a kid
| because didn't have a real place to safely bike--narrow
| country roads). But might have done so if there was a
| real practical reason to do so.
|
| Of course, inline skating _was_ a popular activity at one
| time and it just fell out of fashion.
| thornewolf wrote:
| and this callout is funny because it's actually re-emerging
| as a popular hobby. so there is probably some subconscious
| influence that led you to call it out here.
| ghaff wrote:
| I haven't seen it much but I think it's a lot of fun and
| still have my gear in the garage.
| graton wrote:
| > Submitted on 31 Mar 2024
|
| Almost looks like an April Fools Joke.
|
| > The above model contains several Extremely Reasonable
| Assumptions (ERAs). The first ERA is the very conservative
| assumption that there is only one gender, with all children and
| all names adhering to the same gender. Thus any child may be
| given any name, so long as it exists in the names list1. Another
| ERA is the Mayfly Parenthood Assumption, in which all parents
| perish immediately upon naming their child, which makes the math
| substantially easier.
| defrost wrote:
| It was in New Zealand and Australia, it's just the GMT-XX zones
| are a bit slow to catch on.
| ufo wrote:
| SIGBOVIK is always close to April's fool's day :)
| sohamgovande wrote:
| An Abundance of -Katherines- K8s, I hear...
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| KT's
| xyst wrote:
| Or the more tragic version: Keighty
| jameshart wrote:
| Kubernetes is such a lovely name for a girl.
| yesseri wrote:
| > The above model contains several Extremely Reasonable
| Assumptions (ERAs). [...] Another ERA is the Mayfly Parenthood
| Assumption, in which all parents perish immediately upon naming
| their child, which makes the math substantially easier."
|
| This paper is just filled with hilarious quotes.
| poopcat wrote:
| Not going to lie the first thing I thought was, "Why is the John
| Green book on HN??" I mean, cool, but surprising. Then I read the
| end and it made more sense ha
| passwordoops wrote:
| If papers came with theme music, this would make a good pairing
|
| https://youtu.be/1nN_5kkYR6k
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| I lay awake at night thinking about the baby naming problem.
|
| I want my child to have a name in the sweet spot. Not too common,
| not too unique, and, crucially, not a name that is popular for
| only a brief period so that everyone will know about how old they
| are just by their given name[0].
|
| But people thinking along these lines inevitably gravitate to the
| same small handful of names, causing the "too popular for a brief
| period of time" effect against their will. I've already failed
| once; my cat is named Olivia, _the_ popular girl 's name of the
| decade, apparently.
|
| [0] My own name is one of those. It's annoying.
| sameoldtune wrote:
| Why not let your child be a product of their times? Whatever
| name you pick it isn't like your great grandchildren will think
| you picked a cool, relevant name for their grandmother.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| Because I personally find my name being a product of its time
| annoying, I think it's reasonable to suspect that someone
| else would also find that annoying.
|
| Especially given that the hypothetical person in question
| would get half their DNA from me and be raised by me it seems
| a pretty reasonable suspicion.
| butlike wrote:
| Are you implying we should name the kids via some BabyLLM?
| /joking
| resource_waste wrote:
| I did great people in history, this way my children are cursed
| with high expectations.
| xyst wrote:
| I'm a bit partial to "Ellie" after one of the characters in my
| favorite game: Last of Us
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I was never going to have kids, but if I did, I had rules for
| naming.
|
| 1. Name them what you're going to call them. If you want a
| "Kate", don't name them "Katherine". If you want a "Sam", don't
| name them Samuel.
|
| 2. Don't give them the same first name as a close relative.
|
| 3. Don't give them a unique spelling of a common name. You're
| just giving them a life-long annoyance of having to spell their
| name out any time they're telling someone their name vocally.
|
| My parents broke the first two rules when they named me and it
| created headaches as I transitioned into adulthood. It even
| caused problems when I interned at Intel, where he'd been
| working for 15 years. I got e-mails that were supposed to go to
| him, and vice-versa.
| vundercind wrote:
| Yes to 2, BIG yes to 3, a "special" spelling is a curse, why
| do that to your kid?
|
| I do prefer full versions for the name instead of shortenings
| or nicknames. I think it lets them feel freer, earlier, to
| switch to the full version if they like it better than the
| nickname or shortened version. More options.
| ksenzee wrote:
| I'm glad my parents didn't follow rule 1. They wanted to call
| me Kathy. It took me until grad school to convince everyone
| in my life that I was Katherine and absolutely not a Kathy,
| tyvm. If I'd had to run it by a judge, I'd have been pretty
| unhappy. As it was, I was grateful they gave me a classic
| name with lots of nickname options. (Too bad I didn't know
| about the paper in time to join in.)
| margalabargala wrote:
| > 2. Don't give them the same first name as a close relative.
|
| My parents wanted to name me after my grandparents but they
| solved this nicely.
|
| My first name is the middle name of one of my grandparents,
| and my middle name is the first name of another grandparent.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| One of my kids' middle name is my grandmother's first name.
| The other's first name is my great-grandmother's first name
| (which is also my mother's middle name).
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| May I recommend https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com ?
|
| Despite the name it has a pretty large category of real world
| names. :)
|
| I am being completely sincere. There are thousands of lists of
| baby names. Classic information overload. A randomizer let you
| look at ten options and if you don't like those you can get
| another ten.
| hasbot wrote:
| I like having a name like you describe. It's former popularity
| makes it a familiar name but I've only met a couple of other
| people with the same first name. Interestingly combined with my
| similar popularity last name there are on the order of 30
| people with matching first and last names in the US.
| kodablah wrote:
| My suggestion is to hit up the Social Security Administration
| website: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/. Go back a century
| (or to some era of choice), walk the list, find one that you
| like that isn't even in the top X these days and you'll be
| fairly safe. You'll end up with a reasonable, not-ridiculously-
| unique name that this generation mostly doesn't have (the site
| has recent years and names don't usually go from unlisted to
| popular overnight).
|
| > the popular girl's name of the decade, apparently.
|
| Keep in mind, in the internet era it can actually be nice to
| have a bad-SEO common name (though that's often dependent upon
| surname too).
| themadturk wrote:
| My mother chose my first name (three characters) specifically
| to avoid it being turned into a nickname.
|
| This worked so well she later chose a completely unrelated
| nickname for me.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Like any good Presbyterian, I named my Son after the great
| Archibald Alexander, the progenitor of Princeton Theological
| Seminary . Myself, I am named after the great theologian John
| Calvin.
|
| However, if I have a daughter, I will name her Britney - an
| anagram for Presbyterians
| ryanisnan wrote:
| I knew what we were in for when I read
|
| > ... we create a model which is not only tractable and clean,
| but also perfectly captures the real world.
|
| Kudos to the authors for a good sense of humour.
| lacoolj wrote:
| feels like an april fools post based on section 2
|
| > 2 Related works: Surprisingly, no one has ever done any
| research on naming strategies (so long as you conveniently ignore
| [4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24,
| 25] and likely other work).
| gregates wrote:
| If you combine Katherine, Catherine, Kat, Kate, Caty, Katy,
| Katie, and Katheryn (there are SO MANY variants, but most of them
| have never been popular), peak popularity for girls in the U.S.
| in the last century is in 1986 at only 1.8% of baby girls.
|
| That's less popular than the single name Matthew for boys, or any
| one of Jessica, Ashley, Amanda, or Jennifer, in that same year. I
| expected it would be higher: my own sister is one of these, and I
| had a friend circle in my 20s that included a Katie, a Katherine
| (who went by Kat), a Caitlin, and a Kathryn.
|
| Source: baby name popularity is one of our favorite test data
| sets at Row Zero, and we do lots of analyses like this for fun,
| e.g. https://rowzero.io/blog/baby-names-rise-of-n
| rsync wrote:
| I live in the bay area.
|
| Between, say, 2012 and 2018 there was a wave of "Ronin".
|
| I still get a chuckle thinking of these soccer dads, watching
| from the sidelines, wistfully thinking:
|
| _My son ... The wayward samurai..._
| madcaptenor wrote:
| A paper by Jinseok Kim, Jenna Kim, and Jinmo Kim: "Effect of
| Chinese characters on machine learning for Chinese author name
| disambiguation: A counterfactual evaluation" . Obviously the
| authors don't have Chinese names but I would imagine personally
| having names that need disambiguating might spur one's interest
| in this research area. (And they do mention in the paper that
| it's also an issue for Korean names.)
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01655515211018...
| solveit wrote:
| Yeah, it's interesting how the practice of only listing
| surnames works well in cultures where people have long and
| distinct surnames (and often common first names) and is just
| silly in cultures where surnames are short and common and most
| of the information content of the name is in the first name.
| hooverd wrote:
| You can get baby name data for every n>5 name by year from the
| SSO: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/limits.html
|
| It's... interesting. More Khaleesis and Gokus than you'd think.
| viridian wrote:
| Naming can be hard, because names are important.
|
| My wife and I legitimately sat down and came up with a list of 50
| names we each liked, and from the 98 we had totaled up, we
| applied a series of different filters to get to an answer over
| the span of several weeks.
|
| First we each went through the list, and force removed half of
| them, each of us taking turns eliminating one at a time.
|
| From the remaining 50 we rated them, and removed anything that
| scored under a 6 from either of us, or under 15 points total.
|
| Then we had 20 left, that we talked through each fairly
| extensively. We covered etymology, popularity, age association,
| popular cultural associations, you name it. After that we each
| removed 5 more.
|
| Once we were down to the top ten, armed with frankly far too much
| knowledge about these names at this point, we reranked them
| individually and tallied up the scores.
|
| Two names stood head and shoulders above the rest, one scoring
| around a 19 total and the other scoring around a 17. Those became
| our daughter's first and middle names.
| themadturk wrote:
| We never intended to have children, ended up with two boys.
|
| The first was named by his mother's choice: First name after
| her father (a perfectly reasonable "Edward"), the middle name
| after my dad ("Leonard," which we never call him.)
|
| The second was even more of a surprise than the first, but that
| meant it was my turn: "Jonathan," after a favorite character
| from a novel. The middle name was chosen by his big brother, to
| give a little sense of ownership or participation: "Adam."
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| In "The Three Most Important Things in Life," Harlan Ellison
| refers to "the improbably-named Briony Catling."
|
| I think he was onto something. Never heard of either of those
| names in the real world.
|
| [edit] OK, so I had to check and I was wrong. Must have been one
| of his other essays. But for the uninitiated, here you go:
| https://harlanellison.com/iwrite/mostimp.htm
|
| You're welcome ;-)
| Asparagirl wrote:
| See also the noted 2014 economics paper that studied the
| phenomenon of co-authorship of economics papers...
|
| "A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors"
|
| by Allen C. Goodman (Wayne State University), Joshua Goodman
| (Harvard), Lucas Goodman (UMD), and Sarena Goodman (the Federal
| Reserve Board)
|
| https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/joshuagoodman/files/goodma...
| njarboe wrote:
| As a Nick born in the 70's, I thought my world was getting a bit
| weird as Nick's were poping up everywhere all of a sudden. Then I
| saw a video on the top ten boy's names from 1880-2020[1] and saw
| Nicholas pop up in the top ten in 1986, peak at #5 in 1990-1992,
| and drop off in 2004. I blame Nicholas Cage and Nick Nolte.
|
| [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7hkR5FUVdc
| bradhilton wrote:
| Some parents try to have their cake and eat it too by altering
| the spelling or pronunciation of otherwise common names, thus
| ensuring their child both fits in and is unique.
|
| Cheekiness aside, naming our children has been a fun, stressful,
| but ultimately rewarding endeavor and this paper was very on
| point.
| uberdru wrote:
| The three most beautiful names in English: Katherine, Elizabeth,
| Alexandra. Pure magic.
| internetguy wrote:
| oh my god this paper is wonderful... had me in tears with
| laughter note the adorable little dinosaurs!
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