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posted by janrinok on Saturday April 12 2014, @12:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the call-me-what-you-will dept.

The BBC has an article about how a name can affect someone throughout their life. One table shows the chance of attending Oxford with a given name, and a graph shows the downward trend of naming children one of the top 50 most popular names.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday April 13 2014, @12:12AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 13 2014, @12:12AM (#30637) Journal
    Educated/wealthy parents who have expectations and picks 'royal' names for the children is a hypothesis to explain the correlation. Granted, TFA doesn't go long enough into proving/disproving this hypothesis but does more than spitting out a statistic and pretending is causation.
    The "isn't regurgitating statistics" doesn't necessarily imply "it provides explanations": for me, listing hypotheses and "don't know yet"-s was enough. My apologies if my comment title created higher expectations than I intended.
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  • (Score: 1) by TGV on Sunday April 13 2014, @06:03AM

    by TGV (2838) on Sunday April 13 2014, @06:03AM (#30706)

    To me, an explanation along the lines of educated parents with expectations pick other names is already problematic, because even if there is a causal relation, it's more likely to be the parent's behavior rather than the name which affects the child. Let me put it this way: if everyone named their children Eleanor and and Peter, would everyone have a doctorate by the time the last Shane and Shannon die?

    No need to be sorry, but remarkable claims require remarkable proof. I didn't see any. The claim that the effect comes from the name itself, and hence that a name has an almost magical power over the owner, is a remarkable claim, and not even the plain and simple possibility that the whole effect is just "post-hoc" is eliminated. So until there is an experiment where we measure the parents' expectations beforehand, and the test leaders assign a name to the child (that the parents obviously can't know), and then establish the influence of that name, there is no proof.

    Sorry if I come across as strict in this. I've seen far too many flaky articles to accept that things just get published and take for true.