
Why Your Name Matters - dsr12
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/12/why-your-name-matters.html
======
Whitespace
Somewhat tangentially related, the company I work for was recently acquired by
a very large corporation with 30,000+ employees. They auto-generated login and
email addresses for everyone in my company, using the following schema (my
legal name is Thomas Takashi Clark, but I go by Tom Clark):

\- tclark \- ttclark \- thclark \- thoclark \- thomclark \- etc.

The first ones being already taken, I got "thoclark" as my login. I'm not sure
why, but I became _extremely_ upset at this, almost as if I was having an
anxiety attack. I think the reason was that in no way, shape or form did I
view "thoclark" as my personal identity, and for someone to assert that "tho"
was me was akin to being charged with a crime I didn't commit. I wasn't
comfortable with the thought of having to type that in multiple times per day,
and I definitely wasn't comfortable telling others what my new professional
email was.

They changed it to tomclark after a lot of pleading, but I'm curious as to why
I had became so upset. I think the whole process would have been a lot better
if I had the opportunity to choose my own login/email instead of someone
saying, "hey, this is you now!"

Has anyone here had such a reaction before?

~~~
sedev
I've had that experience: the logins that get automatically assigned at the
Big Enterprise Company where I work, are sometimes nonsensical. I've seen some
coworkers with just surname@example.com, but many more with an arbitrary
combination of their given name and surname. The hash they made of my legal
name was to my eyes _ugly,_ and it didn't help that it's difficult to speak. I
also have a lot of coworkers whose backgrounds are in Asia or the Indian
subcontinent, and I can't imagine they're happier about their names getting
mangled.

~~~
yen223
As a Chinese guy, we are used to having our names mangled, because our family
name comes first. Any site that requires a "first" name and a "last" name will
almost always display our names backwards. Ex: If your name is Lee Kuan Yew,
your name will usually be rendered as "Kuan Yew Lee".

A good example of this is noted director Ang Lee - whose real name should be
Lee Ang.

Indians also face name issues, mostly because of the length. 20-30 character
names are not uncommon.

(Also, the Indian subcontinent is part of Asia.)

~~~
StavrosK
When you say if should be Lee Ang, do you mean that the family name is Lee and
should go first according to the Chinese rules?

~~~
yen223
That's right.

~~~
StavrosK
I see, thank you.

------
pessimizer
Your name matters in the US because if you sound (or look) like you're black,
white people won't hire you, or listen to you, really, as much as your white
peers. They'll see your work as worse than your peers' work when they are
equivalent. You have to be the best of all your peers in order not to be the
first to be laid off, because your pain and discomfort is less intelligible to
your bosses than your coworkers' pain and discomfort.

As a Jamal, I've found it pretty effective to use young white men as a proxy
to push projects in the direction that I think they should go in. White kids
fresh out of college (at least of late, maybe past 5-10 years) seem to be less
racist than their older peers, and really impressed that you're older and you
know a lot of stuff.

Sadly, I think that this generation's freshly graduated white kids are less
racist simply because they have had less direct experience of black people
than their parents and grandparents, who moved as far from black people as
they possibly could. A professionally intimidating black person (because I
have 15 years experience and they have 5, not because I'm that good:)) as a
living, breathing reality in front of them is a fascinating novelty that they
have no idea how to react to. They may rap at you sometimes, though. Ugh.

This article gets a bit bogged down in the "name" aspect of the thing, though.
Race is a cultural construction designed to rationalize outgroup
discrimination, and consists of a bunch of markers that people use to
determine which group you should be placed in, and therefore how you should be
treated. A name doesn't have to be "Da'Quan," "Monique Washington" will work
as well.

~~~
lisper
> white people won't hire you, or listen to you

 _Some_ white people. Not all white people. The qualifier is important. With
it, it's a true statement. Without it, it's a racist slur.

~~~
walshemj
yeah right there's enough studies showing that identical CVs with ethnic names
get discriminated to make your point moot - I am a middle class white and i
can see that.

~~~
lisper
> I am a middle class white

Why is that relevant? Does being a middle class white have an impact on your
ability to discern the truth? Why "I am a middle class white and i can see
that" and not, say, "I am a fisherman and I can see that."?

But as to your point, consider these statements:

1\. Middle class whites use faulty logic in Hacker News discussions.

2\. Some middle class whites use faulty logic in Hacker News discussions.

Notwithstanding the results of any studies, do you not see that there's a
salient difference between the two?

~~~
walshemj
I meant that as a privileged person even I can see that other groups and
minorities have much harder time than I do - something you obviously do not -
possibly you need to take a look at your self.

You where using a spurious "logical" argument to excuse racist views.

~~~
lisper
> something you obviously do not

Really? What makes that so obvious?

> You where using a spurious "logical" argument to excuse racist views.

Which racist views am I excusing? Because I don't think I'm excusing a racist
view at all. Quite the contrary.

The only thing I've actually said that you could legitimately judge me by is
that it important to qualify the statement "if you sound (or look) like you're
black then white people won't hire you, or listen to you" because if you don't
qualify it then it sounds like you are making a statement about all white
people, and this statement is only true of some white people, not all white
people. So if you don't qualify it, it's a racist slur, no different from
saying, "Moslems are terrorists" or "black people are criminals". Some (but
not all) Moslems are terrorists (and so are some non-Moslems), and some (but
not all) black people are criminals (and so are some white people), and some
(but not all) white people are racists (and so, by the way, are some black
people).

Do you actually disagree with any of that?

------
collyw
My theory behind this, which the article doesn't touch on, is that maybe
alternative lifestyle parents are far more likely to go for unusual names (I
know a few "hippy" parents myself, and their kids are more likely to have less
common names, "River" or "India" being two I know off the top of my head).
These same people are less likely to push the child in traditional directions
- study hard, work hard, good job, head down. They are far more likely to let
their child grow up in a less pressured way.

Anyway, that's just my personal observation from hanging out with friends with
less conventional lifestyles over the years.

(My other theory would be that the kids raised in less conventional ways,
would be more likely to follow their passions, and enjoy their work, rather
than becoming a corporate lawyer or accountant. Probably have less mental
breakdowns or mid-life crises, but this is all speculation on my part).

~~~
gaius
Also on the front page of HN right now: Buckminster Fuller.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6943883](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6943883)

~~~
cafard
Buckminster is a good old New England last name; a Joseph Buckminster gave the
Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in 1802 (see Adams's history of the US
1800-1816). I can't imagine that Fuller's first name hindered him any more
than (say) Kingman Brewster's hindered him.

------
morgante
Interesting article, especially since I always assumed that having an uncommon
name is beneficial. I'm "morgante" virtually everywhere and people tend to
remember my name pretty easily. There has to be some benefit to that.

On the other hand, it definitely seems like we could be looking at an instance
of correlation. My educated, left-wing parents chose a fairly unusual name and
that also reflects how they raise me. So it's hard to disassociate any of my
name from my upbringing in deciding any impact on life outcomes. Probably the
best studies in this are the ones comparing siblings, but even those are
susceptible to third variables (perhaps second children are more likely to get
a common name, and are certainly raised differently).

------
bsirkia
Whenever I read about this, I wonder at what point it's worth changing your
name. Your name is kind of a weird thing, even though it seems like such an
ingrained part of you, you can legally change it to something that would
freakonomically make you better off.

~~~
ars_technician
I think the name is just a correlation, not a causation. To put it bluntly,
you won't fail because your name is "London", you will probably fail because
you grew up with a parent that thought London was a good name for a person.

Changing your name is just hiding the symptom, not the cause.

~~~
jaytaylor
Even still, might it be worth it to change ones name if it makes a measurable
improvement in the odds?

~~~
AmVess
My real name is Richard Monroe Niksonn, which rules out a career in politics.

------
hrvbr
Most social sites require a unique name, for no reason other than a technical
convenience. Maybe this practice of making all names rare can have a negative
effect on people.

------
pedalpete
Does the authors comment "are so many doctor Dans simply because Dan is a
common name", not opposed to the methodology used "men with unusual names, the
study found, were more likely to have flunked out or to have exhibited
symptoms of psychological neurosis than those with more common names."

In the first study, they weren't looking at the number of "Doctor Dans", they
were looking at a subset of people and placing them all along a graph and
watching for trends in performance not based on a name, but based on the
popularity of the name. These strike me as different things, but I'm no expert
in these (or any) type of study.

------
ExpiredLink
> _A rare name, the professors surmised, had a negative psychological effect
> on its bearer._

No, no, no! Because correlation is not causation. Period. The prevailing
social science nowadays isn't psychology but pseudology.

~~~
kevincennis
That's referring to a 1948 study though. The author is just providing
background and setting the stage. It's not the research that the article is
actually about.

Hardly seems worth getting upset over.

~~~
hbags
Many readers on this site love to attack research by reading an article about
the research or reading just the abstract, and then assuming that the
researcher was slightly dumber than algae. This is just another example of
that particular blend of arrogance and ignorance.

------
amenod
There is an aspect that the article doesn't present sufficiently - why do
people have their name? Do they perform differently because of the name or is
their name a consequence of something that altered their behavior?

For instance, if some immigrant is willing to change his name (as stated in
article) he would probably be willing to make other things that would make him
blend better into the new society, which could mean he was earning more. In
this case name change is just a symptom, not the cause.

~~~
girvo
The very end of article haphazardly try to point that effect out. It's a
signal for other important things rather than something that has an effect
directly.

------
summerdown2
I once submitted a story to a writing group, where the protagonist was an evil
dictator trying to return from hell. Some liked it, some didn't - but one
thing made everyone unhappy.

The consensus was I needed to change the name of the main character because
"people called Tom can't be mass murderers."

------
wink
Wasn't there a similar study either in Freakonomics or Super Freakonomics?
IIRC they boiled it down to level of education and how well the the children
with uncommon names were doing. Of course it had anecdata of two brothers
named Winner Doe/Jones/etc and Loser Doe/Jones/etc.

~~~
judk
It was in the original book, and after the book sold millions of copies they
walked back their exaggerated claims.

------
Tomte
The worst I have seen was at a former employer.

We had two people with the name "John Doe", and the mail scheme at the company
resulted in john.doe@company.invalid.

The second one got... john.doe1@company.invalid

~~~
StavrosK
Hmm, why is that a problem? I don't get it.

~~~
mrhlee
Perhaps it'd be better to have john.doe1 and john.doe2, since someone who
wasn't aware yet of the numbering convention may be confused by who used
john.doe1. Or, they make a typo by leaving out the number and it goes to the
wrong recipient.

~~~
StavrosK
But that would mean that everyone must get a number, even
prokopis.papadopoulos1@.

------
yetanotherphd
I really don't like these Resume studies where they send out a bunch of
resumes with different names.

A resume can be an extremely noisy signal, and the best statistical signal
might be the ethnicity implicit in the name. When you actually meet the
person, you get a lot more information, and the employer might rely less on
the person's race as a source of information/bias.

~~~
route66
Your own reply proves them very descriptive and close to reality: If ethnicity
is interpreted by the reader as the best statistical signal (which conveys the
bias of the reader, not of the resume) the "... actually meet the person... "
is not going to happen. Reducing this to an information density problem
explains nothing. Why do yo _really_ don't like them?

