So I’ve recently decided to change my real name from an oriental one to John Adams. I am not white.
There’s a significant amount of evidence that shows that
(1) Common names have better reception in many areas, especially publication and job interviews.
(2) White names do significantly better than non-white names
(3) Last names that begin with the early letters of the alphabet have a significant advantage over last names beginning with the latter letters of the alphabet.
Therefore if I were to use “John”, one of the most common ‘white’ first names, along with Adams, a ‘white’ surname that also begins with the letter A, it should stand that I would be conferred a number of advantages.
Furthermore, I have very little attachment to my family heritage. Switching names doesn’t cost me anything beyond a minor inconvenience of having to do paperwork. For some people, changing your name may be extremely worthwhile, depending on your current name, and how attached you are to it. At least, it may be worthwhile to consider it, and depending on the person, may be a very cheap optimization with significant benefits.
Man, this is that thing I was talking about earlier when someone takes a colloquial phrase that sounds like a universal quantifier and interprets it as literally a universal quantifier.
Actually, what’s at play here is not the implicit domain restriction of natural language quantifiers, because he obviously didn’t restrict the domain of the quantifier to just those mathematicians that have an Eastern European last name; that’d make the statement trivial. Rather, the phenomenon we see here is what’s self-explanatorily called “loose talk”, where you can say things that are strictly true when they are close enough to being true, i.e. when the exceptions don’t matter for current purposes.
A typical failure mode for computer scientists, who typically are trained to check statements against boundary cases / extreme values, to make sure an exception isn’t thrown / that the result isn’t out of bounds.
Actually, most people will identify with a scientist’s last name more than a first name—so pick a scientist’s last name that sounds like a first name for your own first name, and then another last name that sounds like a last name for your last name.
(--> those kinds of names are / that kind of name is ;-))
pronounced the former way in America and the latter way in Britain
I would dispute that, insofar as the real truth is that the latter is used by people trying to imitate the pronunciation in the original language (a good thing to do to the extent possible, IMO), and I don’t know the distribution of such people in America vs. Britain.
so I’d guess the former
...but this guess happens to be correct in the case of EY himself.
I have a Caribbean-American friend who’s grateful his parents gave him a fairly white name for exactly this reason. I think having the same name as a famous historical figure would be bad for your google search results, though.
My father once heard a story about this. An Asian immigrant family decided to give their son an American-sounding first name, “Peter”. Unfortunately, their family name was “Pan”...
The biggest flaw in this idea is that almost nothing in your references applies to you! They pretty much cover only black and white names, not Oriental ones. You can’t conclude that a white name benefits you because it would benefit a black person. Even in the Swedish study, a quick trip to Wikipedia shows that the number of foreign-born residents from east Asia in Sweden is a tiny percentage.
Furthermore, none of the studies you quote account for switching costs since they just compare people who already have the names, except for the Swedish one, but I would expect that the switching cost as a new immigrant is much less than for someone who has been living with his name for a while.
In addition, ‘John Adams’ seems common enough a name that it should be possible to verify whether that specific combination has any correlated benefits.
I would also expect that an extremely common name, like John Adams, might have negative consequences that wouldn’t be picked up by a study, if the study doesn’t distinguish somewhat common names and names that are common enough to sound like cliches.
I wouldn’t. A golden-mean effect where names which are too rare hurt and names which are too common also hurt is one of the first and most obvious hypotheses which come to mind, and I would be extremely surprised if no researcher had checked for this and this suggestion either debunked or embraced with qualifications.
(2) White names do significantly better than non-white names
Not all white names are made equal. You want a name that’s associated with high status in the country in which you live.
In Germany being named Kevin is a low status signal. The same is true for most US names. Lower class people in Germany are more likely to give their children the name of US celebrities than German high class people.
I’m German and would agree. Kevin not only sounds low Status but is also a name for kids, so it’s even handicapped in more than one respect.
I’ve thought about adopting “Aaron Alexander Grey”, the middle name being my father’s first name and Grey being an adaptation of my current last name that probably no one except Germans could really hope to pronounce correctly.
Also I don’t want to stay in Germany so Aaron Alexander Grey is more of an attempt at a name that I imagine may be overall an internationally well recieved name. Thoughts?
By the way if you’re a German citizen you can’t just change your name unless you provide a good reason… like having idiot parents who decided Adolf is a proper first name for their child (way after WW2 mind you). If ever, I’ll probably change my name once I become a Swedish citizen where you can do that kind of thing. Being Swedish (at least by citizenship) is probably also a very good signal internationally speaking. Better than German for sure.
Names trend over time in rather smooth curves of popularity.
In the U.S., there aren’t any laws about what you can call your kids, but the Social Security Administration tracks popularity of names. For instance, the second most popular girl’s name this year is Emma, which was also the third most popular in 1880 … and the 451st most popular at its low point in 1978. The most popular name today, Sophia, tracks a similar curve with a low point in the ’40s.
The most popular girl’s name in my age cohort was Jennifer — the #1 girl’s name from 1970 to 1984! — but Jennifer has been on the way down ever since. Today’s American girls are more likely to have an Aunt Jenny than a classmate Jenny. To me, Jennifer (or Jessica, Melissa, Amy, or Heather) sounds like someone my age, not a little kid. Young girls are named Ashley, Hannah, Madison, Alexis … and baby girls are Isabella, Sophia, Emma.
Male names are stabler than female names, but mostly because some names (Michael, Matthew, Daniel, William …) are persistently popular.
No I meant it like you interpreted it, “Timmy” and “Benny” are names that you would clearly associate with children rather than adults. And my impression is that Kevin is also in that category, though perhaps it’s not as extreme a case as those two names. I never understood why parents would call their son Benny, why not officially call him Ben and use Benny in the family as long as he’s a kid and doesn’t mind?
No one ever heard of Benny the mighty conquerer or Benny the badass CEO. Benny is a cute name, not a serious name for a grown man. Kevin may be perceived differently in America, perhaps because the name is older there while in Germany it’s indeed a rather new name...
Being Swedish (at least by citizenship) is probably also a very good signal internationally speaking. Better than German for sure.
If you go to the ex-Eastern Block, you find German usually has the signal “awesome rich industrial powerhouse, want to imitate, the kind of capitalist overlord I would want to be become, bossing over everybody” and Swedish has the signal “pretty people with funny ideas like non-gendered kindergartens, lacking courage or else they would beat the shit out of immigrant rapists”.
Basically in Eastern Europe German is the second most powerful signal after American, and since people tend to worship power it works...
By the way if you’re a German citizen you can’t just change your name unless you provide a good reason...
Same in my country. And my reason is pretty similar—I’ve had people from my own country who constantly mispronounce my name, and I don’t even want to think how badly foreign people would distort it, as I plan to emigrate. (Also I don’t find it in the least bit euphonic, but that’s not a reason I would ever admit to on a state form.)
But I gather from your comment that compatibility with foreign languages / pronunciations is not considered an acceptable reason in countries that have stricter laws concerning name change?
Also, that if you have dual citizenship and one of your countries allows you a name change, the other country is obliged to recognize the name change? Is that right?
Also, that if you have dual citizenship and one of your countries allows you a name change, the other country is obliged to recognize the name change? Is that right?
What’s supposed to oblige the country?
In general it probably gives you a decent reason to request a name change in the other country as well. If you however search an unreasonable name you might still get denied.
I don’t know, I was asking whether I had understood the parent comment right. I don’t know much about name change legislation, and would like to find out more.
I was thinking along the lines of, well, it’s not as if any given country “owns” somebody’s name—it’s a property of the person, right? As in, you can’t have one legal name in one country and another in some other country. That’s what common sense tells me at least. But then again I’ve been surprised by law on several occasions in the past, to say the least...
I know it’s at least possible to have variant names; I am legally registered in different countries by parallell names analogous to “Venice” and “Venezia”.
Gee. Law’s weirder than I thought. But these facts open up some promising possibilities, now that I think about it… after all it’s the munchkin ideas thread. Thanks to everybody for clearing this up for me, and thanks to whatever higher power is least astronomically unlikely to exist for not giving me the suicidal idea to pursue law as a profession.
Nope. Your relationship to your name doesn’t fit most of the bundle of rights that the word “property” implies.
you can’t have one legal name in one country and another in some other country
Of course you can. Why not? Consider immigrants who acquired a new citizenship but did not renounce their old one—the names on their two sets of papers do not have to be identical.
I was thinking along the lines of, well, it’s not as if any given country “owns” somebody’s name—it’s a property of the person, right?
That’s a bad train of thought. You have to think about the institutions involved. There are certain things that international law guarantees to you, that your country is obliged to provide to you.
Things like “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.”
“Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.”
In this case also important:
“(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality.
(2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.”
You don’t really have an inane right for two nationalities. If a country allows you dual citizenship it’s a nice thing to do. As such I wouldn’t expect naming right to arise as a consequence.
As in, you can’t have one legal name in one country and another in some other country.
That’s certainly not the case.
If I remember right you can’t have the same legal name in South Korea as in Germany or New York.
In South Korea your name needs to be written in Hangul and the legal documents about you are addressed to the name in Hangul. In Germany your name has to be in the standard Latin alphabet (I don’t know how much accents it allows).
Quick Googling suggests that the case for China is similar. You get to choose between Simplified characters or Traditional Chinese ones.
There are certain things that international law guarantees to you, that your country is obliged to provide to you.
No, there are certain things that international law says are guaranteed to you, that international law says your country is obliged to provide to you.
You need the additional premise “if international law says a country is obliged to provide something, then that country is obliged to provide it”. I see no reason to believe that premise. It doesn’t seem to be true either as a statement about how countries should behave or about how countries actually behave.
A double twist: there are German names that look like English names but are actually German names. Michael, Paul.
Just wondering: what would Germans associate with the name Helga for women? To me it sounds Viking-awesome (heiligr).
If you want to name your kids in a way that is compatible without pronounciation issues in the larger Central European area, from Denmark to Hungary or Serbia, there are unfortunately not so many choices. For boys, Robert, Norbert, Henrik and of course the ubiquitous Peter. For girls, Helga, maybe Judit, Eva, Anna, For example something like Catherine is not a very good idea because it is written different in every language, from Katalin to Yekaterina. Anna has only one mutant forms, Anne in English, otherwise quite stable. For boys the stablest name is Norbert it either doesn’t exist in a language or if it does it is written and pronounce exactly the same.
However I think people are becoming more “creative” and less compatibility-oriented with names… I know a German couple living in London who have a son called Yuriy. Reason? Gagarin. “We wanted someone who goes up”. Okay...
Definitely agree that changing your name is a good option to have on the table.
I’d note though that in some industries having a Google-unique name is king. It really depends what your “personal brand strategy” is. I remember reading an interview with a marketer who recommended people consider name changes. Her name was “Faith Popcorn”. I read that single interview probably 5-10 years ago. It wasn’t even a particularly interesting interview. I still remember her name, though.
I think it’s probably advantageous to have one’s name be subconsciously associated with high status people, but not to have it be consciously associated.
For instance, a name like “James” may have higher class associations than “Antwon,” but naming a kid “Jimmy Carter Washington” is liable to raise the associations to a conscious level and provoke speculation about the motives of the parents (or other namer.)
This sounds like an excellent idea. I’m going to take the liberty of discussing my own name and I hope to get some opinions.
My surname, ‘Armak’, is a misspeling of Ermak, sometimes written Yermak. I have no love lost for this name. Its main effect on my life is that when I introduce myself, people respond with “Daniel What?”. And people who see it written in Hebrew always pronounce it wrong (because Hebrew normally has no written vowels, it’s very bad at transliteration of foreign names). It would be an ordinary name in Russia or Ukraine, but I’m unlikely to even visit those countries.
So I want to choose a common name that is “at home” in Hebrew and English and, preferably, Russian. Something short and simple that can be pronounced by speakers of pretty much any language, in case I associate with Chinese in the future, or something similarly unexpected.
But I’m very much afraid of bureaucratic hassle. It’s easy to change a name, but records with the old name will follow me all my life. And I’m afraid that many organizations deal poorly with people who try to prove that their name changed and they should have access to their accounts or records opened under their old names.
On the other hand, most Western women and a few men change their names when they marry (and sometimes when they divorce). And this presumably doesn’t create big difficulties, because it’s socially expected. So maybe the infrastructure for name-changing already exists and my fears are unfounded.
Has this been quantified? Like surveying people who changed their legal names (other than when marrying or divorcing) after a few years.
Disclaimer: I haven’t been serious enough to invest the time to research this myself.
You don’t find that surnames in Hebrew just get mispronounced a ton, in general? Other than ones which have standard pronunciation, I encounter constant errors with people trying to figure out which vowels to put where when it comes to last names, although that may be biased because my last name, despite being very straightforward in English, is a puzzle for Israelis.
Also, from anecdotal data and a bit of personal knowledge, changing your last name here in Israel doesn’t seem like much of a hassle, other than having to do it in person.
My dad changed his name when he became a citizen...and got sufficiently annoyed at the hassle that he changed his name back. Note—this wasn’t a major name change, he changed it from “Amarjit Singh Jolly” to “Jolly Amarjit Singh”
To give you one anecdotal account in the U.S., my mother changed her last name after my parent’s divorce (not to her maiden name) and hasn’t seemed to have any problems purchasing a house, dealing with her bank accounts, medical bills and (recently) applying for social security.
This sounds like a reasonable motivation to change one’s name, but personally, I would have picked something not already attached to a rather famous person. I think it’s probably more advantageous to have a name which is “generic” in that it doesn’t immediately call up a single immediate association.
But I’m worried that with such a generic English name people will expect me to speak perfect English, which means they’ll be negatively surprised when they hear my noticeable accent.
You will be impossible to google for with the name “John Adams”. Whether that matters to you is up to you, but a Google check is a good idea anyway. As it happens, the real John Adams is a very illustrious figure (in America), but you want to avoid calling yourself Charles Manson.
I’ve considered changing my name since the first day I understood that names could be relatively normal.
You see my kind parents thought it would be endearing to name me Dusty.
Suffice to say, I’ve had a hard time projecting a certain sort of image for myself with a name like that. The only merit I’ve ever noted in my birthname is recognition. For better or worse, no one forgets a Dusty.
I try to diffuse some of the negative image by shoehorning in humor, “hello I’m Dusty, like the adjective,” but eventually I’m going to have to get it changed...
Are you sure White names do better than ALL non-White names? The papers you sourced compare US White to Black names and Swedish to “immigrant” names—both kind of hyperbolic examples. Nothing about White names vs Asian names, which I would expect to get different results. Also, in some industries or cases having a foreign/ethnic/unique name could be a positive.
FWIW, if I met an Asian guy with a WASPy name like John Adams I would think either he is adopted or changed his name/identity, which might send me negative signals such as duplicity, cunning, and cowardice.
FWIW, if I met an Asian guy with a WASPy name like John Adams I would think either he is adopted or changed his name/identity, which might send me negative signals such as duplicity, cunning, and cowardice.
Lots of Asian Americans are adopted, or are mixed European/Asians. European male / Asian female pairings (which would lead to a European last name) are about three times as common as European female / Asian male pairings.
In general, first name assimilation is seen positively by most Americans I know, and has been very common in the Asian American community, both for first-generation immigrants and their descendants. (Last name assimilation is less common, but I think still seen positively.)
Of the Eastern Asian grad students I know, it is common to adopt a Western first name (especially if they’re Chinese; the transliteration from Chinese to English was clearly not designed by an English-speaker, as Chowchew can attest).
When naming you children consider giving them multiple names from different cultures. You don’t have to use the names actively, just add them and use the first one. This simplifies ‘changing’ the name later much—as you already have the name.
Quick question. If I told you my name is Gee Kalero 1) is the pronounciation of Gee equal to that of the letter “G”, or the beggining of the word “djibouti” or “jeez”? Do you see a difference between the three sounds? 2)Kalero is easier to pronounce than caleiro right?
1) is the pronounciation of Gee equal to that of the letter “G”, or the beggining of the word “djibouti” or “jeez”? Do you see a difference between the three sounds?
I’m not a native English speaker, but I believe the three examples you gave are pronounced the same.
2)Kalero is easier to pronounce than caleiro right?
Their about the same.
What connotations does Kalero give?
Kalero simply looks weird since unlike Caleiro it’s not recognizably from any linguistic tradition. Also for names people haven’t seen before C’s give off more positive connotations than K’s, this is a well known trick among fantasy authors.
Calero > Kalero (you are the third person to tell me that. so that is decided)
When people pronounce Caleiro, it looks like they are having big troubles. Calero still feels latin, but I thought it would be easier to say.
I’m mostly concerned about academic recognizability. Some people manage to be on top while being called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Lyubuomirsky, or Vilayanur Ramachandran. But it is very hard, and I made mistakes recalling all three. Compare with Hilary Putnam, Steve Pinker, or Daniel Craig.
Gee (G) is my nickname anyway. Calero is easier to recall.
But my friend in Law said I’d have to buy the Judge, you can only switch legally here when 18.
My instinct is that this is stupid, but I have a feeling I may be mindkilled on this. Someone should test this; create sockpuppets with male and female names to see how common and critical replies are.
Would normally have downvoted, incidentally, but not going to in case I’m just siezing upon excuses to lower the status of perceived political opponents.
Someone should test this; create sockpuppets with male and female names to see how common and critical replies are.
My prediction (based on prior expectations and observation of behaviours directed at existing lesswrong members) is that a female username will tend to be the target of less rivalry motivated aggression than a male username but can anticipate far more challenges and status attacks from female usernames that identify themselves strongly as high status.
I think of myself as having solid medium status at LW. I’m quite pleased with it, but don’t feel a drive for more status.
I think you may be underestimating a little. It is easy to neglect just how many lower status people there are… because low status people just don’t seem as salient and visible.
IIRC, people used to think that the Sun was about a median-luminosity star, but actually it’s more like 85th percentile; but less bright stars are harder to see. (And my parents don’t think of themselves as particularly wealthy people, because they tend to compare themselves to the people you see on TV, rather than the people you see in the streets.)
I’m certainly looking up more than down when I assess my status. However, I think that I’d count my status as higher if I had the same karma but got a significant amount of it from major posts rather than from comments.
On LW, karma is a reasonable proxy for status on LW. They aren’t the same, but I don’t see how you think NancyLebovitz’s question is non-responsive.
It very likely is that length of active membership on LW is highly correlated with karma (even last-30-days-karma). But isn’t length of active membership a reasonable proxy for status in a community?
I may not have put the question in the best place, but I asked it because I said I thought I had mid-level status, and people disagreed by pointing out that I have high karma.
I think the question is what we mean by mid-level. Brazil is a mid-level economy in the G20, but the G20 is the extreme tail of the distribution of country-economies. With a wider reference class, Brazil is a pretty big economy.
Hopefully to help you calibrate: I perceive you as Brazil -ish (wedrifid is more like UK, I’m more like New Zealand or Iran). And every lurker is Haiti. Because of the distribution of status on LW is probably Bell-curve shaped, there are a lot more Haitis than Brazils. (Because of lower bounds, status in a community is more like half a bell curve than the whole thing—someone who knows statistics probably could find a lot of errors in my terminology).
I may not have put the question in the best place, but I asked it because I said I thought I had mid-level status, and people disagreed by pointing out that I have high karma.
There is certainly a strong correlation between karma and status. In no small part because simple time spent interacting on the site contributes to both rather significantly through raw accumulation and domain specific practice. However for my part when I questioned your mid-level status estimate your karma didn’t occur to me and I wasn’t aware you had as much as you had. I queried my intuitive impression of how the NancyLebovitz handle behaves and is received by people on the site. Your influence is not insignificant.
That’s a time lag (rather than something more sinister, e.g. something fundamentally flawed in the LW code base’s understanding of integers); the rankings are not recomputed on a real-time basis, but the scores are.
I had guessed it was the other way round, given that my 30-day karma is 379 according to the green bubbles at the top and 408 in the top contributors list, and it was higher yesterday, and I recently paid the toll to comment on a downvoted thread a couple of times.
Not sure what Nancy thinks, but for me it’s “when this person speaks, others listen, with respect and often with deference”. I don’t think Nancy qualifies there, but I am not sure how to check that.
The question is, how would one measure this? The obvious metrics available are the number of comments and upvotes vs those for a similar comment by a regular of average status. Furthermore, if the replies are more respectful than average even in a disagreement, it is also an indication of higher status. This is hard to measure, of course. In the next order one would look at the timeline of comments and votes: higher-status posters are likely to attract more immediate reaction and an initial spike of upvotes.
There are, of course, exceptions. When Eliezer posts in favor of censorship, he gets downvoted more than average. In general, the status does not need to be the same across all topics, different regulars are considered experts in different areas. There is, of course, some halo effect spill-over between topics.
If someone here is interested in studying social dynamics on internet forums, they might shed further light on the issue or at least do some research.
On a related topic, see mycomments on whether status differences serve useful community functions. My current guess is that status differences are counterproductive on net for achieving community goals, but I’d be interested to read counterpoint if anyone’s got any (especially you, Mr. High Status Person).
Ideally status could be replaced by domain specific estimates of competence, reliability, trustworthiness etc. But in practice nobody has the time. We have to summarize.
For humans, social status is much more than just an aggregate estimate of competence/reliability/trustworthiness. It motivates us, distorts our thinking, plays a key role in our politics, etc. To take just one example, I suspect that the main reason it’s so hard for most people to change their mind is because they don’t know how to do it in a way that preserves their status. For many people and social groups, admitting you’re wrong means losing face, and most people don’t like to lose face, so they resist publicly changing their mind.
(This is another reason why status differences may be counterproductive for rational communities… they could create an incentive for high-status people to not change their mind about things, since they have something to lose. The evidence may very well justify thinking one thing one week, then something else the next week, then something else the third week. But if you’re changing your mind about critical issues every week, it won’t be long before typical humans take you less seriously. Which is unfortunate.)
Also, this doesn’t sound like your true objection to me. It doesn’t take very many more bits of information to transfer 3 estimates on each of competence, reliability, and trustworthiness than a single aggregate number. And people communicate specific info all the time (“how good is X at Y? do you trust Z?”). It’s not obvious to me that a single aggregate quantity is frequently useful. Let’s say I introduce a friend to you and say his status is 67⁄100; was that useful information? (And in practice, peoples’ status is often determined by relatively silly things like how many friends they have, what status they’re perceived to have, how confident they act, and how confidently they talk. Another reason status sucks: it gives people an incentive to make confident predictions; see Philip Tetlock’s work on how confident experts are more likely to be wrong and more likely to be quoted in the media.)
(I don’t think I’ve got a clear idea of how best to make use of humans’ status wiring; I’m just kind of exploring different ideas at this point. But it seems like an important and neglected topic.)
Eliminating status differences has been tried and failed. If a hiring manager ever tells you “There are no office politics here”, then don’t take the job. There WILL be politics, except that it will be taboo to publicly admit it—and nobody will help you if you have a problem.
“X has been tried and faied” remains true until someone succeeds. If a thing with so many advantages has been tried and failed, then the solution is not to give up and make an equivalent utterance to “man was not meant to fly”; it is to examine why it failed, explore what the underlying rules and mechanics might be, construct a strategy based on those underlying rules and mechanics, and then try again.
Let me rephrase, then: declaring that you’ve eliminated status differences, when, in reality, you haven’t, is a relatively common mistake that tends to cause problems.
declaring that you’ve eliminated status differences, when, in reality, you haven’t, is a relatively common mistake that tends to cause problems.
Aha, much more understandable. Thank you.
In that case: what would you surmise from a hiring manager that said “there’s office politics everywhere, of course, but we try to take an active role in minimizing their impact, and part of you being a good fit here will depend on your ability to help us with that goal.”?
(I regretfully confess that my own reaction to that statement would depend on that hiring manager’s gender, and (if male) how tall he was and how deep his voice was).
Perhaps a good way to deal with the situation in that XKCD comic would be to try to pick a culture that seemed particularly effective and then copy all of its norms, attitudes, etc.? So you’d have something that was battle-tested, if you will.
Well, Valve’s profitability per employee is supposedly higher than Google or Apple’s, and their employee handbook detailing their unconventional corporate culture is available for viewing online. shrug
(For what it’s worth from what I can tell Mormons don’t even formally make the sort of ontological commitments that are typical of (at-least-somewhat-reflective) mainstream Christianity (like, ‘Jesus is my savior and I should have expected Him to show up in all logically possible worlds and all possible minds should be rounded-up-to-infinitely compelled by His story and the seemingly contingent features of Jesus [Jesus’s teachings] are actually universal features of Logos and so it would be an obvious epistemic sin to disregard Him [them]’) and so it’s more plausible that it would be possible to go along with Mormonism in something like good faith, even if only jokingly or subtly-ironically or something.)
Will, out of curiosity; do you enclose your comments in parentheses to give them the quality of a “whispered aside”, as if the camera had cut to a couple of conversants sitting in the back stalls? Because that’s what it does in my brain.
I give a 70% chance that Mormon doctrine holds that Jesus is accidental (in the sense of not existing in all possible worlds). He has a physical body, after all. For that matter, so does God.
Mormon theology is too weird for me to fully grok, though.
“so many advantages” is optimistic in my opinion; I actually think it’s an at least somewhat close call. There are also upsides to status differences, like better group coordination (as I mentioned earlier). If people know there are methods for them to attain high status, and pursuing high status using these methods can have positive side effects (e.g. starting companies that make products people want and generate consumer surplus, or writing blog posts that lots of people benefit from reading), that can be a good thing. Another thing: when you’re having a conversation, you’d probably prefer for the most knowledgeable/intelligent/rational people to talk more than those who are less knowledgeable/intelligent/rational, and status differences often seem to have the side effect of accomplishing this. (But you can also get a suits/geeks type thing where some people are smooth talkers and some people know lots of math.)
(These are just my thoughts, I’m sure there’s more stuff that hasn’t occurred to me.)
If people know there are methods for them to attain high status, and pursuing high status using these methods can have positive side effects (e.g. starting companies that make products people want and generate consumer surplus, or writing blog posts that lots of people benefit from reading), that can be a good thing.
Only in situations where the cost of failure is low. One of the larger failure modes I’ve experienced in status games is that the difference between success and failure is a narrow and often random margin, and yet the status payoffs are insanely amplified and tend towards a positive feedback loop (the Matthew Effect again). So often times, you don’t actually get a proper selection pressure that leads to the more intelligent/knowledgable/rational people acquiring more status; what you get is the people who know how to leverage their current status get more status. And once you have that, you’re “locked in” to an oligarchy for good or ill.
I have an idea for eliminating status on LW, if that’s what people want. My own status is ‘glad I’m allowed in here at all’, so it wouldn’t make a difference for me personally. ;-) What if your posts didn’t show your username, but just a post ID, and you yourself could see your karma, but no-one else could? There might be problems with PMs, but I’m sure there are programmers here who could find a solution to that.
What if your posts didn’t show your username, but just a post ID, and you yourself could see your karma, but no-one else could? There might be problems with PMs, but I’m sure there are programmers here who could find a solution to that.
Your suggestion would indeed eliminate most status and reputation influences from the site. And this would be a bad thing.
I prefer to know who I am reading, even if, as in the case of many usernames here, the knowledge is no more than “this is the same person who wrote these other things”. It gives context to the words: what they mean can depend very much on who is saying them. And one can hardly have a coherent conversation if there is no way to join up separate comments into a single identity.
It’s not a bad idea if that werewhatttt people wanted, but there are people I definitely want to ignore on here, and people who I think worth spending more time on than others.
Geh, got to update in favour of some behaviors being more common than I thought now.
I’m not sure that removing usernames is necessarily a good idea; they have a valid and important benefit.
Let us assume that a person says X. I suspect that X is most likely incorrect. I then look at that person’s username. If:
a) The username is one that I recognise, and belongs to a person who I have found is right far more often than wrong; then I take a closer look at X, and ask the person to explain, and generally put some effort into investigating X. It is likely that X is not as wrong as I thought, and I would learn something.
b) The username is one that I recognise, and belongs to a person who often posts things that are incorrect. I don’t bother to waste time trying to research X, since I am now even more confident that X is wrong.
c) The username is not one that I recognise, or it is one that I recognise but have not formed an opinion on yet. I may spend a small amount of effort thinking about X; but I am likely to nudge the username a little closer to category b.
In this way, I can optimise the amount of effort I put into trying to see which statements are correct, by putting the most effort into statements from which I am most likely to learn something new.
On the contrary, high-status people can countersignal by publicly changing their mind on things in light of new evidence. You just have to show the evidence as well as the changing of your mind. I mean, if someone’s right, that’s one thing—but publicly changing your mind distinguishes you from people who are merely right by demonstrating the process behind getting things correct.
On the contrary, high-status people can countersignal by publicly changing their mind on things in light of new evidence.
Sometimes. In particular circumstances. With difficulty. Even in circumstances that are abnormally in favour of sanity the status signal is still arguable. But note that effectively gaining social power isn’t about just signalling high status a lot. It’s about navigating social interactions with whichever signals are most effective. Someone who only signals high status comes across as ‘rigid’ or ‘brittle’. I suggest that much of the signalling benefit for mind changing is actually signalling competence and increasing likeability rather than by directly signalling high status in the moment.
On the contrary, high-status people can countersignal by publicly changing their mind on things in light of new evidence.
I agree. And there’s a trick to it, which you described pretty well. I’m just giving that as an example of how big a deal status is: if you don’t know the trick for changing your mind and staying high status, then it can be hard to change your mind, and difficulty changing one’s mind may be the #1 rationality failure mode in the general population.
Even if she were vain enough to launch status attacks on other members to elevate her own status, which I don’t think she is, attacking other female members to lower their relative status sounds like the opposite of her track record.
By mentioning it, you have only made it more likely. Are you sure you want what you’re saying, or do you only wish to denote it while connoting the opposite?
So I’ve recently decided to change my real name from an oriental one to John Adams. I am not white.
There’s a significant amount of evidence that shows that
(1) Common names have better reception in many areas, especially publication and job interviews.
(2) White names do significantly better than non-white names
(3) Last names that begin with the early letters of the alphabet have a significant advantage over last names beginning with the latter letters of the alphabet.
Source :
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19020207 http://blog.simplejustice.us/files/66432-58232/SSQUKalistFinal.pdf http://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/sunrpe/2006_0013.html http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873.pdf?new_window=1 http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
Therefore if I were to use “John”, one of the most common ‘white’ first names, along with Adams, a ‘white’ surname that also begins with the letter A, it should stand that I would be conferred a number of advantages.
Furthermore, I have very little attachment to my family heritage. Switching names doesn’t cost me anything beyond a minor inconvenience of having to do paperwork. For some people, changing your name may be extremely worthwhile, depending on your current name, and how attached you are to it. At least, it may be worthwhile to consider it, and depending on the person, may be a very cheap optimization with significant benefits.
I once considered changing my name to Ben Abard but decided that the original Eliezer Yudkowsky sounded more like a scientist.
I wonder how Jewish names perform relative to gentile names.
Reminds me of all the Jewish actors who’ve changed their names to make it in Hollywood, and all the executives who’ve done the exact opposite.
I’ve always been mildly annoyed that I don’t have an eastern European last name. All the cool mathematicians seem to have eastern European last names.
You mean, a lot of cool mathematicians are eastern European. But Terry Tao and Shinichi Mochizuki are not.
Man, this is that thing I was talking about earlier when someone takes a colloquial phrase that sounds like a universal quantifier and interprets it as literally a universal quantifier.
Yeah, people do that all the time.
In ordinary language, all universal quantifiers are implicitly bounded.
Actually, what’s at play here is not the implicit domain restriction of natural language quantifiers, because he obviously didn’t restrict the domain of the quantifier to just those mathematicians that have an Eastern European last name; that’d make the statement trivial. Rather, the phenomenon we see here is what’s self-explanatorily called “loose talk”, where you can say things that are strictly true when they are close enough to being true, i.e. when the exceptions don’t matter for current purposes.
A typical failure mode for computer scientists, who typically are trained to check statements against boundary cases / extreme values, to make sure an exception isn’t thrown / that the result isn’t out of bounds.
OK, there are disproportionately many Jewish scientists, but how else does “Eliezer Yudkowsky” sound like a scientist’s name?
Now, if you really want a name that sounds like a scientist, how about renaming yourself Isaac Feynmann, Galileo Crick, or Rosalind Newton?
Actually, most people will identify with a scientist’s last name more than a first name—so pick a scientist’s last name that sounds like a first name for your own first name, and then another last name that sounds like a last name for your last name.
I’ll be Maxwell Tesla.
Too funny; those are the middle names of my kids! :)
Maxwell Edison’s probably better known....
Yes, but my internal inference-checker refuses to be associated with it.
I expect ialdabaoth wants to be thought of as a scientist, not a sociopath.
It reads like a pretty good scientist name. I have no idea how it sounds ;)
Because you don’t do subvocalization when you read? Or you’re deaf? Or some other reason...
Some other reason: I just don’t know how EY pronounces “Yudkowsky” -- [jʊd’kaʊski] or [ju:d’kɔvski] or otherwise.
But there is a significant overlap between great names for scientists and words that would be worth a lot in Scrabble if proper nouns were allowed.
EY pronounces it the first way, but his father pronounces it the second(!).
Usually that kind of names are pronounced the former way in America and the latter way in Britain, so I’d guess the former.
(--> those kinds of names are / that kind of name is ;-))
I would dispute that, insofar as the real truth is that the latter is used by people trying to imitate the pronunciation in the original language (a good thing to do to the extent possible, IMO), and I don’t know the distribution of such people in America vs. Britain.
...but this guess happens to be correct in the case of EY himself.
I have a Caribbean-American friend who’s grateful his parents gave him a fairly white name for exactly this reason. I think having the same name as a famous historical figure would be bad for your google search results, though.
Being hard to Google can also be a plus.
Or he could adopt a middle name that would distinguish him when people really wanted to search for him.
“Steve Smith was known as Sarcasticidealist until June 2009. While he is still both sarcastic and idealistic, he decided that he’d rather go by his real name for privacy reasons. If this does not make sense to you, Google “sarcasticidealist” and then Google “Steve Smith”.”
Not “Quincy” then.
My father once heard a story about this. An Asian immigrant family decided to give their son an American-sounding first name, “Peter”. Unfortunately, their family name was “Pan”...
Probably an urban legend, but kind of funny...
Did he then proceed to change his last name to Bannings and become a lawyer?
The biggest flaw in this idea is that almost nothing in your references applies to you! They pretty much cover only black and white names, not Oriental ones. You can’t conclude that a white name benefits you because it would benefit a black person. Even in the Swedish study, a quick trip to Wikipedia shows that the number of foreign-born residents from east Asia in Sweden is a tiny percentage.
Furthermore, none of the studies you quote account for switching costs since they just compare people who already have the names, except for the Swedish one, but I would expect that the switching cost as a new immigrant is much less than for someone who has been living with his name for a while.
In addition, ‘John Adams’ seems common enough a name that it should be possible to verify whether that specific combination has any correlated benefits.
I would also expect that an extremely common name, like John Adams, might have negative consequences that wouldn’t be picked up by a study, if the study doesn’t distinguish somewhat common names and names that are common enough to sound like cliches.
I wouldn’t. A golden-mean effect where names which are too rare hurt and names which are too common also hurt is one of the first and most obvious hypotheses which come to mind, and I would be extremely surprised if no researcher had checked for this and this suggestion either debunked or embraced with qualifications.
Not all white names are made equal. You want a name that’s associated with high status in the country in which you live.
In Germany being named Kevin is a low status signal. The same is true for most US names. Lower class people in Germany are more likely to give their children the name of US celebrities than German high class people.
I’m German and would agree. Kevin not only sounds low Status but is also a name for kids, so it’s even handicapped in more than one respect.
I’ve thought about adopting “Aaron Alexander Grey”, the middle name being my father’s first name and Grey being an adaptation of my current last name that probably no one except Germans could really hope to pronounce correctly. Also I don’t want to stay in Germany so Aaron Alexander Grey is more of an attempt at a name that I imagine may be overall an internationally well recieved name. Thoughts?
By the way if you’re a German citizen you can’t just change your name unless you provide a good reason… like having idiot parents who decided Adolf is a proper first name for their child (way after WW2 mind you). If ever, I’ll probably change my name once I become a Swedish citizen where you can do that kind of thing. Being Swedish (at least by citizenship) is probably also a very good signal internationally speaking. Better than German for sure.
What do people named Kevin get called when they grow up then?
Names trend over time in rather smooth curves of popularity.
In the U.S., there aren’t any laws about what you can call your kids, but the Social Security Administration tracks popularity of names. For instance, the second most popular girl’s name this year is Emma, which was also the third most popular in 1880 … and the 451st most popular at its low point in 1978. The most popular name today, Sophia, tracks a similar curve with a low point in the ’40s.
The most popular girl’s name in my age cohort was Jennifer — the #1 girl’s name from 1970 to 1984! — but Jennifer has been on the way down ever since. Today’s American girls are more likely to have an Aunt Jenny than a classmate Jenny. To me, Jennifer (or Jessica, Melissa, Amy, or Heather) sounds like someone my age, not a little kid. Young girls are named Ashley, Hannah, Madison, Alexis … and baby girls are Isabella, Sophia, Emma.
Male names are stabler than female names, but mostly because some names (Michael, Matthew, Daniel, William …) are persistently popular.
Bacon. Spacey. Sorbo. Costner. Kline.
I suppose he means its a newly introduced name.
That’s one interpretation, but I certainly wouldn’t have used the phrasing he did if I meant to convey that meaning.
When think “A name for children,” I think of variations on ordinary names which people usually grow out of, like “Timmy.”
No I meant it like you interpreted it, “Timmy” and “Benny” are names that you would clearly associate with children rather than adults. And my impression is that Kevin is also in that category, though perhaps it’s not as extreme a case as those two names. I never understood why parents would call their son Benny, why not officially call him Ben and use Benny in the family as long as he’s a kid and doesn’t mind?
No one ever heard of Benny the mighty conquerer or Benny the badass CEO. Benny is a cute name, not a serious name for a grown man. Kevin may be perceived differently in America, perhaps because the name is older there while in Germany it’s indeed a rather new name...
http://www.freakonomics.com/2009/10/22/kevin-is-not-a-name-its-a-diagnosis/
...and oddly enough all the Kevins I remember from my old school years were always the class clown.
On the other hand, there is Benny the Jet.
If you go to the ex-Eastern Block, you find German usually has the signal “awesome rich industrial powerhouse, want to imitate, the kind of capitalist overlord I would want to be become, bossing over everybody” and Swedish has the signal “pretty people with funny ideas like non-gendered kindergartens, lacking courage or else they would beat the shit out of immigrant rapists”.
Basically in Eastern Europe German is the second most powerful signal after American, and since people tend to worship power it works...
Could very well be true. But it leaves open the curious question what on earth I would be looking for in the ex-eastern block ;)
Cheap talent mainly.
Same in my country. And my reason is pretty similar—I’ve had people from my own country who constantly mispronounce my name, and I don’t even want to think how badly foreign people would distort it, as I plan to emigrate. (Also I don’t find it in the least bit euphonic, but that’s not a reason I would ever admit to on a state form.)
But I gather from your comment that compatibility with foreign languages / pronunciations is not considered an acceptable reason in countries that have stricter laws concerning name change?
Also, that if you have dual citizenship and one of your countries allows you a name change, the other country is obliged to recognize the name change? Is that right?
What’s supposed to oblige the country?
In general it probably gives you a decent reason to request a name change in the other country as well. If you however search an unreasonable name you might still get denied.
I don’t know, I was asking whether I had understood the parent comment right. I don’t know much about name change legislation, and would like to find out more.
I was thinking along the lines of, well, it’s not as if any given country “owns” somebody’s name—it’s a property of the person, right? As in, you can’t have one legal name in one country and another in some other country. That’s what common sense tells me at least. But then again I’ve been surprised by law on several occasions in the past, to say the least...
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
I know it’s at least possible to have variant names; I am legally registered in different countries by parallell names analogous to “Venice” and “Venezia”.
Gee. Law’s weirder than I thought. But these facts open up some promising possibilities, now that I think about it… after all it’s the munchkin ideas thread. Thanks to everybody for clearing this up for me, and thanks to whatever higher power is least astronomically unlikely to exist for not giving me the suicidal idea to pursue law as a profession.
Nope. Your relationship to your name doesn’t fit most of the bundle of rights that the word “property” implies.
Of course you can. Why not? Consider immigrants who acquired a new citizenship but did not renounce their old one—the names on their two sets of papers do not have to be identical.
That’s a bad train of thought. You have to think about the institutions involved. There are certain things that international law guarantees to you, that your country is obliged to provide to you.
Things like “Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.” “Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.”
In this case also important: “(1) Everyone has the right to a nationality. (2) No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.”
You don’t really have an inane right for two nationalities. If a country allows you dual citizenship it’s a nice thing to do. As such I wouldn’t expect naming right to arise as a consequence.
That’s certainly not the case.
If I remember right you can’t have the same legal name in South Korea as in Germany or New York.
In South Korea your name needs to be written in Hangul and the legal documents about you are addressed to the name in Hangul. In Germany your name has to be in the standard Latin alphabet (I don’t know how much accents it allows). Quick Googling suggests that the case for China is similar. You get to choose between Simplified characters or Traditional Chinese ones.
No, there are certain things that international law says are guaranteed to you, that international law says your country is obliged to provide to you.
You need the additional premise “if international law says a country is obliged to provide something, then that country is obliged to provide it”. I see no reason to believe that premise. It doesn’t seem to be true either as a statement about how countries should behave or about how countries actually behave.
A double twist: there are German names that look like English names but are actually German names. Michael, Paul.
Just wondering: what would Germans associate with the name Helga for women? To me it sounds Viking-awesome (heiligr).
If you want to name your kids in a way that is compatible without pronounciation issues in the larger Central European area, from Denmark to Hungary or Serbia, there are unfortunately not so many choices. For boys, Robert, Norbert, Henrik and of course the ubiquitous Peter. For girls, Helga, maybe Judit, Eva, Anna, For example something like Catherine is not a very good idea because it is written different in every language, from Katalin to Yekaterina. Anna has only one mutant forms, Anne in English, otherwise quite stable. For boys the stablest name is Norbert it either doesn’t exist in a language or if it does it is written and pronounce exactly the same.
However I think people are becoming more “creative” and less compatibility-oriented with names… I know a German couple living in London who have a son called Yuriy. Reason? Gagarin. “We wanted someone who goes up”. Okay...
In general people in the creative class do so. It’s not the names the average banker, doctor or judge gives their child.
Definitely agree that changing your name is a good option to have on the table.
I’d note though that in some industries having a Google-unique name is king. It really depends what your “personal brand strategy” is. I remember reading an interview with a marketer who recommended people consider name changes. Her name was “Faith Popcorn”. I read that single interview probably 5-10 years ago. It wasn’t even a particularly interesting interview. I still remember her name, though.
A disadvantage of that particular name is that it’s the name of no fewer than two famous people).
(Or is that an advantage?)
That’s an advantage! My name will thus be subconsciously associated with high-status people.
I think it’s probably advantageous to have one’s name be subconsciously associated with high status people, but not to have it be consciously associated.
For instance, a name like “James” may have higher class associations than “Antwon,” but naming a kid “Jimmy Carter Washington” is liable to raise the associations to a conscious level and provoke speculation about the motives of the parents (or other namer.)
This sounds like an excellent idea. I’m going to take the liberty of discussing my own name and I hope to get some opinions.
My surname, ‘Armak’, is a misspeling of Ermak, sometimes written Yermak. I have no love lost for this name. Its main effect on my life is that when I introduce myself, people respond with “Daniel What?”. And people who see it written in Hebrew always pronounce it wrong (because Hebrew normally has no written vowels, it’s very bad at transliteration of foreign names). It would be an ordinary name in Russia or Ukraine, but I’m unlikely to even visit those countries.
So I want to choose a common name that is “at home” in Hebrew and English and, preferably, Russian. Something short and simple that can be pronounced by speakers of pretty much any language, in case I associate with Chinese in the future, or something similarly unexpected.
But I’m very much afraid of bureaucratic hassle. It’s easy to change a name, but records with the old name will follow me all my life. And I’m afraid that many organizations deal poorly with people who try to prove that their name changed and they should have access to their accounts or records opened under their old names.
On the other hand, most Western women and a few men change their names when they marry (and sometimes when they divorce). And this presumably doesn’t create big difficulties, because it’s socially expected. So maybe the infrastructure for name-changing already exists and my fears are unfounded.
Has this been quantified? Like surveying people who changed their legal names (other than when marrying or divorcing) after a few years.
Disclaimer: I haven’t been serious enough to invest the time to research this myself.
You don’t find that surnames in Hebrew just get mispronounced a ton, in general? Other than ones which have standard pronunciation, I encounter constant errors with people trying to figure out which vowels to put where when it comes to last names, although that may be biased because my last name, despite being very straightforward in English, is a puzzle for Israelis.
Also, from anecdotal data and a bit of personal knowledge, changing your last name here in Israel doesn’t seem like much of a hassle, other than having to do it in person.
Foreign ones do, certainly. That’s why I’d be looking for one that’s familiar to speakers of both Hebrew and English.
My dad changed his name when he became a citizen...and got sufficiently annoyed at the hassle that he changed his name back. Note—this wasn’t a major name change, he changed it from “Amarjit Singh Jolly” to “Jolly Amarjit Singh”
To give you one anecdotal account in the U.S., my mother changed her last name after my parent’s divorce (not to her maiden name) and hasn’t seemed to have any problems purchasing a house, dealing with her bank accounts, medical bills and (recently) applying for social security.
This sounds like a reasonable motivation to change one’s name, but personally, I would have picked something not already attached to a rather famous person. I think it’s probably more advantageous to have a name which is “generic” in that it doesn’t immediately call up a single immediate association.
I’ve always wanted a name like that!
But I’m worried that with such a generic English name people will expect me to speak perfect English, which means they’ll be negatively surprised when they hear my noticeable accent.
You will be impossible to google for with the name “John Adams”. Whether that matters to you is up to you, but a Google check is a good idea anyway. As it happens, the real John Adams is a very illustrious figure (in America), but you want to avoid calling yourself Charles Manson.
I’ve considered changing my name since the first day I understood that names could be relatively normal. You see my kind parents thought it would be endearing to name me Dusty. Suffice to say, I’ve had a hard time projecting a certain sort of image for myself with a name like that. The only merit I’ve ever noted in my birthname is recognition. For better or worse, no one forgets a Dusty. I try to diffuse some of the negative image by shoehorning in humor, “hello I’m Dusty, like the adjective,” but eventually I’m going to have to get it changed...
Are you sure White names do better than ALL non-White names? The papers you sourced compare US White to Black names and Swedish to “immigrant” names—both kind of hyperbolic examples. Nothing about White names vs Asian names, which I would expect to get different results. Also, in some industries or cases having a foreign/ethnic/unique name could be a positive.
FWIW, if I met an Asian guy with a WASPy name like John Adams I would think either he is adopted or changed his name/identity, which might send me negative signals such as duplicity, cunning, and cowardice.
Lots of Asian Americans are adopted, or are mixed European/Asians. European male / Asian female pairings (which would lead to a European last name) are about three times as common as European female / Asian male pairings.
In general, first name assimilation is seen positively by most Americans I know, and has been very common in the Asian American community, both for first-generation immigrants and their descendants. (Last name assimilation is less common, but I think still seen positively.)
Of the Eastern Asian grad students I know, it is common to adopt a Western first name (especially if they’re Chinese; the transliteration from Chinese to English was clearly not designed by an English-speaker, as Chowchew can attest).
Consider Jon Adams, as name length increases, average income decreases.
Names whose spelling is ambiguous are generally a bad idea.
Jay Lee?
In California changing your name costs two or three hundred dollars.
In New Jersey, it’s a bit over one hundred.
Cheaper to get married and then divorced, maybe.
When naming you children consider giving them multiple names from different cultures. You don’t have to use the names actively, just add them and use the first one. This simplifies ‘changing’ the name later much—as you already have the name.
Quick question. If I told you my name is Gee Kalero 1) is the pronounciation of Gee equal to that of the letter “G”, or the beggining of the word “djibouti” or “jeez”? Do you see a difference between the three sounds? 2)Kalero is easier to pronounce than caleiro right?
What connotations does Kalero give?
I’m not a native English speaker, but I believe the three examples you gave are pronounced the same.
Their about the same.
Kalero simply looks weird since unlike Caleiro it’s not recognizably from any linguistic tradition. Also for names people haven’t seen before C’s give off more positive connotations than K’s, this is a well known trick among fantasy authors.
Thank you
Calero > Kalero (you are the third person to tell me that. so that is decided)
When people pronounce Caleiro, it looks like they are having big troubles. Calero still feels latin, but I thought it would be easier to say.
I’m mostly concerned about academic recognizability. Some people manage to be on top while being called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Lyubuomirsky, or Vilayanur Ramachandran. But it is very hard, and I made mistakes recalling all three. Compare with Hilary Putnam, Steve Pinker, or Daniel Craig.
Gee (G) is my nickname anyway. Calero is easier to recall.
But my friend in Law said I’d have to buy the Judge, you can only switch legally here when 18.
good idea.
Next: change your LW nick to vaguely female to get more attention, and possibly lower other members’ expectations about your rationality level.
My instinct is that this is stupid, but I have a feeling I may be mindkilled on this. Someone should test this; create sockpuppets with male and female names to see how common and critical replies are.
Would normally have downvoted, incidentally, but not going to in case I’m just siezing upon excuses to lower the status of perceived political opponents.
My prediction (based on prior expectations and observation of behaviours directed at existing lesswrong members) is that a female username will tend to be the target of less rivalry motivated aggression than a male username but can anticipate far more challenges and status attacks from female usernames that identify themselves strongly as high status.
Alicorn? AnnaSalamon, Julia_Galef and NancyLebovitz have never given the impression that they identify themselves strongly as high status.
I think of myself as having solid medium status at LW. I’m quite pleased with it, but don’t feel a drive for more status.
I think you may be underestimating a little. It is easy to neglect just how many lower status people there are… because low status people just don’t seem as salient and visible.
IIRC, people used to think that the Sun was about a median-luminosity star, but actually it’s more like 85th percentile; but less bright stars are harder to see. (And my parents don’t think of themselves as particularly wealthy people, because they tend to compare themselves to the people you see on TV, rather than the people you see in the streets.)
I’m certainly looking up more than down when I assess my status. However, I think that I’d count my status as higher if I had the same karma but got a significant amount of it from major posts rather than from comments.
Is karma the same thing as status?
No.
I don’t understand why you are asking that question. It does not seem to make much sense as a reply to the grandparent.
On LW, karma is a reasonable proxy for status on LW. They aren’t the same, but I don’t see how you think NancyLebovitz’s question is non-responsive.
It very likely is that length of active membership on LW is highly correlated with karma (even last-30-days-karma). But isn’t length of active membership a reasonable proxy for status in a community?
I may not have put the question in the best place, but I asked it because I said I thought I had mid-level status, and people disagreed by pointing out that I have high karma.
I think the question is what we mean by mid-level. Brazil is a mid-level economy in the G20, but the G20 is the extreme tail of the distribution of country-economies. With a wider reference class, Brazil is a pretty big economy.
Hopefully to help you calibrate: I perceive you as Brazil -ish (wedrifid is more like UK, I’m more like New Zealand or Iran). And every lurker is Haiti. Because of the distribution of status on LW is probably Bell-curve shaped, there are a lot more Haitis than Brazils. (Because of lower bounds, status in a community is more like half a bell curve than the whole thing—someone who knows statistics probably could find a lot of errors in my terminology).
I guess that makes me kind of like Pakistan.
There is certainly a strong correlation between karma and status. In no small part because simple time spent interacting on the site contributes to both rather significantly through raw accumulation and domain specific practice. However for my part when I questioned your mid-level status estimate your karma didn’t occur to me and I wasn’t aware you had as much as you had. I queried my intuitive impression of how the NancyLebovitz handle behaves and is received by people on the site. Your influence is not insignificant.
Natural language being what it is, “not insignificant” != “significant”. What do you think my influence is?
Significant.
No, I meant to ask you what effect(s) you think I’m having.
In general, I think that if you’re on the top all-time contributors sidebar, other people are going to see you as above medium status.
You’re the 13th all-time top contributor, and the… Hold on. There’s something wrong with the “Top Contributors, 30 Days” rankings.
That’s a time lag (rather than something more sinister, e.g. something fundamentally flawed in the LW code base’s understanding of integers); the rankings are not recomputed on a real-time basis, but the scores are.
I had guessed it was the other way round, given that my 30-day karma is 379 according to the green bubbles at the top and 408 in the top contributors list, and it was higher yesterday, and I recently paid the toll to comment on a downvoted thread a couple of times.
What do you consider the most relevant status markers on LW? You’ve mentioned karma, and making major posts rather than comments. What else?
At least one aspect is getting quoted, and that happens very rarely for me.
Not sure what Nancy thinks, but for me it’s “when this person speaks, others listen, with respect and often with deference”. I don’t think Nancy qualifies there, but I am not sure how to check that.
The question is, how would one measure this? The obvious metrics available are the number of comments and upvotes vs those for a similar comment by a regular of average status. Furthermore, if the replies are more respectful than average even in a disagreement, it is also an indication of higher status. This is hard to measure, of course. In the next order one would look at the timeline of comments and votes: higher-status posters are likely to attract more immediate reaction and an initial spike of upvotes.
There are, of course, exceptions. When Eliezer posts in favor of censorship, he gets downvoted more than average. In general, the status does not need to be the same across all topics, different regulars are considered experts in different areas. There is, of course, some halo effect spill-over between topics.
If someone here is interested in studying social dynamics on internet forums, they might shed further light on the issue or at least do some research.
You’re the 3rd highest female poster on the all-time ranking.
I don’t get that any of them identify themselves as higher status than they are. Certainly Anna, Alicorn, and Julia have very high community status.
On a related topic, see my comments on whether status differences serve useful community functions. My current guess is that status differences are counterproductive on net for achieving community goals, but I’d be interested to read counterpoint if anyone’s got any (especially you, Mr. High Status Person).
Ideally status could be replaced by domain specific estimates of competence, reliability, trustworthiness etc. But in practice nobody has the time. We have to summarize.
For humans, social status is much more than just an aggregate estimate of competence/reliability/trustworthiness. It motivates us, distorts our thinking, plays a key role in our politics, etc. To take just one example, I suspect that the main reason it’s so hard for most people to change their mind is because they don’t know how to do it in a way that preserves their status. For many people and social groups, admitting you’re wrong means losing face, and most people don’t like to lose face, so they resist publicly changing their mind.
(This is another reason why status differences may be counterproductive for rational communities… they could create an incentive for high-status people to not change their mind about things, since they have something to lose. The evidence may very well justify thinking one thing one week, then something else the next week, then something else the third week. But if you’re changing your mind about critical issues every week, it won’t be long before typical humans take you less seriously. Which is unfortunate.)
Also, this doesn’t sound like your true objection to me. It doesn’t take very many more bits of information to transfer 3 estimates on each of competence, reliability, and trustworthiness than a single aggregate number. And people communicate specific info all the time (“how good is X at Y? do you trust Z?”). It’s not obvious to me that a single aggregate quantity is frequently useful. Let’s say I introduce a friend to you and say his status is 67⁄100; was that useful information? (And in practice, peoples’ status is often determined by relatively silly things like how many friends they have, what status they’re perceived to have, how confident they act, and how confidently they talk. Another reason status sucks: it gives people an incentive to make confident predictions; see Philip Tetlock’s work on how confident experts are more likely to be wrong and more likely to be quoted in the media.)
(I don’t think I’ve got a clear idea of how best to make use of humans’ status wiring; I’m just kind of exploring different ideas at this point. But it seems like an important and neglected topic.)
Eliminating status differences has been tried and failed. If a hiring manager ever tells you “There are no office politics here”, then don’t take the job. There WILL be politics, except that it will be taboo to publicly admit it—and nobody will help you if you have a problem.
“X has been tried and faied” remains true until someone succeeds. If a thing with so many advantages has been tried and failed, then the solution is not to give up and make an equivalent utterance to “man was not meant to fly”; it is to examine why it failed, explore what the underlying rules and mechanics might be, construct a strategy based on those underlying rules and mechanics, and then try again.
Let me rephrase, then: declaring that you’ve eliminated status differences, when, in reality, you haven’t, is a relatively common mistake that tends to cause problems.
See also.
Aha, much more understandable. Thank you.
In that case: what would you surmise from a hiring manager that said “there’s office politics everywhere, of course, but we try to take an active role in minimizing their impact, and part of you being a good fit here will depend on your ability to help us with that goal.”?
(I regretfully confess that my own reaction to that statement would depend on that hiring manager’s gender, and (if male) how tall he was and how deep his voice was).
Perhaps a good way to deal with the situation in that XKCD comic would be to try to pick a culture that seemed particularly effective and then copy all of its norms, attitudes, etc.? So you’d have something that was battle-tested, if you will.
...Mormons? I don’t wanna. Even though it would probably work.
Well, Valve’s profitability per employee is supposedly higher than Google or Apple’s, and their employee handbook detailing their unconventional corporate culture is available for viewing online. shrug
Eh, it seems worth investigating to me.
(For what it’s worth from what I can tell Mormons don’t even formally make the sort of ontological commitments that are typical of (at-least-somewhat-reflective) mainstream Christianity (like, ‘Jesus is my savior and I should have expected Him to show up in all logically possible worlds and all possible minds should be rounded-up-to-infinitely compelled by His story and the seemingly contingent features of Jesus [Jesus’s teachings] are actually universal features of Logos and so it would be an obvious epistemic sin to disregard Him [them]’) and so it’s more plausible that it would be possible to go along with Mormonism in something like good faith, even if only jokingly or subtly-ironically or something.)
Will, out of curiosity; do you enclose your comments in parentheses to give them the quality of a “whispered aside”, as if the camera had cut to a couple of conversants sitting in the back stalls? Because that’s what it does in my brain.
More or less, yeah. Vladimir Nesov has a similar but distinct habit.
Hmmm, I hadn’t thought of that before.
I give a 70% chance that Mormon doctrine holds that Jesus is accidental (in the sense of not existing in all possible worlds). He has a physical body, after all. For that matter, so does God.
Mormon theology is too weird for me to fully grok, though.
(Eat some sauce.)
“so many advantages” is optimistic in my opinion; I actually think it’s an at least somewhat close call. There are also upsides to status differences, like better group coordination (as I mentioned earlier). If people know there are methods for them to attain high status, and pursuing high status using these methods can have positive side effects (e.g. starting companies that make products people want and generate consumer surplus, or writing blog posts that lots of people benefit from reading), that can be a good thing. Another thing: when you’re having a conversation, you’d probably prefer for the most knowledgeable/intelligent/rational people to talk more than those who are less knowledgeable/intelligent/rational, and status differences often seem to have the side effect of accomplishing this. (But you can also get a suits/geeks type thing where some people are smooth talkers and some people know lots of math.)
(These are just my thoughts, I’m sure there’s more stuff that hasn’t occurred to me.)
Only in situations where the cost of failure is low. One of the larger failure modes I’ve experienced in status games is that the difference between success and failure is a narrow and often random margin, and yet the status payoffs are insanely amplified and tend towards a positive feedback loop (the Matthew Effect again). So often times, you don’t actually get a proper selection pressure that leads to the more intelligent/knowledgable/rational people acquiring more status; what you get is the people who know how to leverage their current status get more status. And once you have that, you’re “locked in” to an oligarchy for good or ill.
I have an idea for eliminating status on LW, if that’s what people want. My own status is ‘glad I’m allowed in here at all’, so it wouldn’t make a difference for me personally. ;-)
What if your posts didn’t show your username, but just a post ID, and you yourself could see your karma, but no-one else could? There might be problems with PMs, but I’m sure there are programmers here who could find a solution to that.
Well, there is the LW anti-kibitzer, which can be enabled via the Preferences page.
Your suggestion would indeed eliminate most status and reputation influences from the site. And this would be a bad thing.
I prefer to know who I am reading, even if, as in the case of many usernames here, the knowledge is no more than “this is the same person who wrote these other things”. It gives context to the words: what they mean can depend very much on who is saying them. And one can hardly have a coherent conversation if there is no way to join up separate comments into a single identity.
It’s not a bad idea if that werewhatttt people wanted, but there are people I definitely want to ignore on here, and people who I think worth spending more time on than others.
Geh, got to update in favour of some behaviors being more common than I thought now.
I’m not sure that removing usernames is necessarily a good idea; they have a valid and important benefit.
Let us assume that a person says X. I suspect that X is most likely incorrect. I then look at that person’s username. If:
a) The username is one that I recognise, and belongs to a person who I have found is right far more often than wrong; then I take a closer look at X, and ask the person to explain, and generally put some effort into investigating X. It is likely that X is not as wrong as I thought, and I would learn something. b) The username is one that I recognise, and belongs to a person who often posts things that are incorrect. I don’t bother to waste time trying to research X, since I am now even more confident that X is wrong. c) The username is not one that I recognise, or it is one that I recognise but have not formed an opinion on yet. I may spend a small amount of effort thinking about X; but I am likely to nudge the username a little closer to category b.
In this way, I can optimise the amount of effort I put into trying to see which statements are correct, by putting the most effort into statements from which I am most likely to learn something new.
Sometimes you need to do things like ban a troll...
On the contrary, high-status people can countersignal by publicly changing their mind on things in light of new evidence. You just have to show the evidence as well as the changing of your mind. I mean, if someone’s right, that’s one thing—but publicly changing your mind distinguishes you from people who are merely right by demonstrating the process behind getting things correct.
Sometimes. In particular circumstances. With difficulty. Even in circumstances that are abnormally in favour of sanity the status signal is still arguable. But note that effectively gaining social power isn’t about just signalling high status a lot. It’s about navigating social interactions with whichever signals are most effective. Someone who only signals high status comes across as ‘rigid’ or ‘brittle’. I suggest that much of the signalling benefit for mind changing is actually signalling competence and increasing likeability rather than by directly signalling high status in the moment.
I agree. And there’s a trick to it, which you described pretty well. I’m just giving that as an example of how big a deal status is: if you don’t know the trick for changing your mind and staying high status, then it can be hard to change your mind, and difficulty changing one’s mind may be the #1 rationality failure mode in the general population.
Another risk of status differences is that good ideas from low status people may get ignored.
My impression is that LW is fairly good about taking people’s behavior one item at a time.
What I meant was that, among these high-status users, only Alicorn strikes me as being vain enough to launch such challenges and status attacks.
Not my impression of her. Feel free to link to these attacks.
Even if she were vain enough to launch status attacks on other members to elevate her own status, which I don’t think she is, attacking other female members to lower their relative status sounds like the opposite of her track record.
But what if I want expectations about my rationality level to be artificially high?
Then change your nick to be very similar to that of a top contributor.
I was really confused there for a moment.
I hadn’t noticed that until you pointed it out. That is genius.
Or do both!
And thus, Aliza_Ludshowski was born.
Rule 63 meets LW.
At least it wasn’t also rule 34.
There is a distinct absence of Eliezer Yudkowsky/Michael Vassar slashfic on the internet. Let’s keep it that way.
By mentioning it, you have only made it more likely. Are you sure you want what you’re saying, or do you only wish to denote it while connoting the opposite?
“Hanson/Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate”.
How does katydee find it?