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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - Less Wrong
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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.