An Abundance of Katherines: The Game Theory of Baby Naming
The paper delves into baby naming competitiveness through game theory, assuming parents choose names for uniqueness. It suggests future research directions. Accepted at SIGBOVIK 2024, it merges Computer Science, Game Theory, and Society, shedding light on decision-making in baby naming.
Read original article
The paper titled "An Abundance of Katherines: The Game Theory of Baby Naming" explores the competitive nature of baby naming using game theory. The authors make assumptions about parents being myopic and picking names based solely on uniqueness to create a tractable model. They conduct numerical experiments and analyze large language models to enhance their investigation. The study concludes by suggesting potential avenues for future research in this field. Accepted at SIGBOVIK 2024, the paper falls under the subjects of Computer Science and Game Theory, as well as Computers and Society. The work provides insights into the decision-making process behind baby naming and how game theory can be applied to understand this phenomenon.
Related
Getting the World Record in Hatetris (2022)
David and Felipe set a world record in HATETRIS, a tough Tetris version. They used Rust, MCTS, and AlphaZero concepts to enhance gameplay, achieving a score of 66 points in 2021.
See how The Sims helped these players change their real lives
The Sims game serves as a platform for players to simulate real-life scenarios, inspiring changes offline. Users have utilized it for business planning, language learning, art passion discovery, and identity exploration.
I read the dictionary to make a better game (2023)
The development of the word search game Tauggle focuses on achieving 100% completion on each board by curating a dictionary with common words. Balancing inclusivity and exclusivity enhances player satisfaction.
A Thousand Primers, Not Just One
The essay critiques generic gamification in education, advocating for intrinsic motivation and subject-specific design. "Zombies, Run!" success is attributed to tailored gameplay, immersive storytelling, and user-centered design principles.
Path Dependence in Relational Design
The article delves into path dependence in relational design, comparing surrogate and natural keys in a database schema for an issue tracker. It stresses key choice significance and schema alteration challenges.
29 commentsFor people unfamiliar with common English names, all of the authors have first names similar to or derived from Katherine.
> Because this paper was written in 2024, we include an obligatory section involving generative AI and LLMs.
> Another ERA is the Mayfly Parenthood Assumption, in which all parents perish immediately upon naming their child, which makes the math substantially easier.
> It is well-known that parents are always in complete agreement over the name they would prefer to pick for their newborn child.
(Also, the submission date, 31 Mar 2024, suggests that the paper was intended to be published on April Fools Day.)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01655515211018...
> ... we create a model which is not only tractable and clean, but also perfectly captures the real world.
Kudos to the authors for a good sense of humour.
This paper is just filled with hilarious quotes.
I want my child to have a name in the sweet spot. Not too common, not too unique, and, crucially, not a name that is popular for only a brief period so that everyone will know about how old they are just by their given name[0].
But people thinking along these lines inevitably gravitate to the same small handful of names, causing the "too popular for a brief period of time" effect against their will. I've already failed once; my cat is named Olivia, the popular girl's name of the decade, apparently.
[0] My own name is one of those. It's annoying.
Almost looks like an April Fools Joke.
> The above model contains several Extremely Reasonable Assumptions (ERAs). The first ERA is the very conservative assumption that there is only one gender, with all children and all names adhering to the same gender. Thus any child may be given any name, so long as it exists in the names list1. Another ERA is the Mayfly Parenthood Assumption, in which all parents perish immediately upon naming their child, which makes the math substantially easier.
What a weird assumption. We named our daughter picking four names, starting respectively with the letters 'G', 'A', 'T' and 'C'.
That birth month, Life magazine featured a full page spread of a home birth (ewwww); their newborn had the same name.
This event is on a list of stuff I/we came to on our own, at the same time as everyone else.
That's less popular than the single name Matthew for boys, or any one of Jessica, Ashley, Amanda, or Jennifer, in that same year. I expected it would be higher: my own sister is one of these, and I had a friend circle in my 20s that included a Katie, a Katherine (who went by Kat), a Caitlin, and a Kathryn.
Source: baby name popularity is one of our favorite test data sets at Row Zero, and we do lots of analyses like this for fun, e.g. https://rowzero.io/blog/baby-names-rise-of-n
Between, say, 2012 and 2018 there was a wave of “Ronin”.
I still get a chuckle thinking of these soccer dads, watching from the sidelines, wistfully thinking:
My son … The wayward samurai…
My wife and I legitimately sat down and came up with a list of 50 names we each liked, and from the 98 we had totaled up, we applied a series of different filters to get to an answer over the span of several weeks.
First we each went through the list, and force removed half of them, each of us taking turns eliminating one at a time.
From the remaining 50 we rated them, and removed anything that scored under a 6 from either of us, or under 15 points total.
Then we had 20 left, that we talked through each fairly extensively. We covered etymology, popularity, age association, popular cultural associations, you name it. After that we each removed 5 more.
Once we were down to the top ten, armed with frankly far too much knowledge about these names at this point, we reranked them individually and tallied up the scores.
Two names stood head and shoulders above the rest, one scoring around a 19 total and the other scoring around a 17. Those became our daughter's first and middle names.
It's... interesting. More Khaleesis and Gokus than you'd think.
I think he was onto something. Never heard of either of those names in the real world.
[edit] OK, so I had to check and I was wrong. Must have been one of his other essays. But for the uninitiated, here you go: https://harlanellison.com/iwrite/mostimp.htm
You're welcome ;-)
Cheekiness aside, naming our children has been a fun, stressful, but ultimately rewarding endeavor and this paper was very on point.
However, if I have a daughter, I will name her Britney - an anagram for Presbyterians
> 2 Related works: Surprisingly, no one has ever done any research on naming strategies (so long as you conveniently ignore [4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25] and likely other work).
“A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors”
by Allen C. Goodman (Wayne State University), Joshua Goodman (Harvard), Lucas Goodman (UMD), and Sarena Goodman (the Federal Reserve Board)
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/joshuagoodman/files/goodma...
Related
Getting the World Record in Hatetris (2022)
David and Felipe set a world record in HATETRIS, a tough Tetris version. They used Rust, MCTS, and AlphaZero concepts to enhance gameplay, achieving a score of 66 points in 2021.
See how The Sims helped these players change their real lives
The Sims game serves as a platform for players to simulate real-life scenarios, inspiring changes offline. Users have utilized it for business planning, language learning, art passion discovery, and identity exploration.
I read the dictionary to make a better game (2023)
The development of the word search game Tauggle focuses on achieving 100% completion on each board by curating a dictionary with common words. Balancing inclusivity and exclusivity enhances player satisfaction.
A Thousand Primers, Not Just One
The essay critiques generic gamification in education, advocating for intrinsic motivation and subject-specific design. "Zombies, Run!" success is attributed to tailored gameplay, immersive storytelling, and user-centered design principles.
Path Dependence in Relational Design
The article delves into path dependence in relational design, comparing surrogate and natural keys in a database schema for an issue tracker. It stresses key choice significance and schema alteration challenges.