All naming strategies are futile

July 10, 2024 3:56 PM

An Abundance of Katherines: The Game Theory of Baby Naming. By Katy Blumer, Kate Donahue, Katie Fritz, Kate Ivanovich, Katherine Lee, Katie Luo, Cathy Meng and Katie Van Koevering. In this paper, we study the highly competitive arena of baby naming. Through making several Extremely Reasonable Assumptions (namely, that parents are myopic, perfectly knowledgeable agents who pick a name based solely on its uniqueness), we create a model which is not only tractable and clean, but also perfectly captures the real world.
posted by gottabefunky (73 comments total)

All I know is that I am Kenough.
posted by grumpybear69 at 4:01 PM on July 10 [8 favorites]

This reminds me of a sitcom I used to watch called Teachers. The main cast were all in an improv group called The Katydids, and their names were Caitlin, Katy, Cate, Kate, Katie and Kathryn :-)
posted by 41swans at 4:01 PM on July 10 [4 favorites]

I just made sure that each of my children had a different first initial to any other family member. Much easier to use the laundry marker for A,B,C,K etc than write out the whole name.

The initial went on everything - lunch box, shoe, sock, book, pencil, toys, handkerchief, EVERYTHING.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 4:09 PM on July 10 [13 favorites]

For about a decade there were three different Kates who were prominent in a not-huge artistic community I was part of. They ended up doing a show all together out of frustration. Very much the same vibes.
posted by sixswitch at 4:10 PM on July 10 [1 favorite]

the highly competitive arena of baby naming

And yet I've never heard of a Baby Naming Tournament...
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:13 PM on July 10 [5 favorites]

About six months before Frozen was released, my sister named her newborn daughter Elsa. She just liked the sound of it.

Reader, this was an unfortunate choice.
posted by nushustu at 4:15 PM on July 10 [25 favorites]

At one point I worked in a steak house where 5 other Greg's also worked, so we came up with nicknames for each other. Mine was Grog.
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:17 PM on July 10 [6 favorites]

The ~unique~ baby names people come up with always sound extremely stupid to me, but I'm coming from the unique perspective of someone with an extremely common first name (in the top 25 for at least a century -- no, not Catherine), an extremely uncommon last name, and a middle name that is only known to a specific ethnic group. If I took the last name Smith and had a kid, I might see the argument for naming my child Meat Dress.
posted by grandiloquiet at 4:23 PM on July 10 [2 favorites]

i’m telling you all: the perfect name exists and that name is sperry topsider. do you have kids? think about how much cooler they would be if they were named sperry topsider [lastname] instead of whatever they are currently named
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 4:30 PM on July 10 [18 favorites]

(I'm completely shirking my responsibility to engage with the actual post content but I couldn't help responding to An Abundance of Katherines with A Multitude of Amys.)
posted by kristi at 4:33 PM on July 10 [1 favorite]

See also KatieConf
posted by nickzoic at 4:35 PM on July 10 [2 favorites]

The paper itself is BRILLIANT. Make sure to click through to the PDF to read it. Here's a taste: "Naming a child is akin to choosing an outfit for the Oscars. It must be unique enough to stand out - no one wants to show up to the Oscars in the same dress - but it must also be similar enough to be recognizable as a name. Lady Gaga’s meat dress is fine for an afternoon, but a child named 'Meat Dress' would soon become discontented, if not the plaintiff of a lawsuit."

There are also a couple of very, very good math jokes.
posted by OrangeDisk at 4:45 PM on July 10 [18 favorites]

Having giggled my way through the article while being sure that I am missing most of the technical jokes—what tendencies in game theory are being parodied here? I can guess some of them (the ridiculous starting assumptions) but much is sailing over my head.

You probably could chart Ashkenazi names on a plot, given that most of us are named after dead relatives; my mother’s Hebrew name is part of a chain that goes back to at least my ggggg-gf.
posted by thomas j wise at 4:52 PM on July 10 [3 favorites]

All names were made up at some point. I work in pediatrics so I have frequent exposure to novel names and spellings, and you know, as long as people don’t name their kids something MEAN,* why do I need to give a damn?

*I also recommend against trying to name your kid something clever or “clever”, “William dollar”
posted by obfuscation at 4:58 PM on July 10 [3 favorites]

The science of naming has a long and illustrious history that we didn’t bother to look at.

Even though I did not understand the math jokes, this article was hilarious! Also, it reminded me of the Kids in the Hall: These Are the Daves I Know and Thirty Helens Agree.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 5:02 PM on July 10 [10 favorites]

This is hilarious.
Because this paper was written in 2024, we include an obligatory section involving generative AI and LLMs.
posted by signal at 5:21 PM on July 10 [7 favorites]

we create a model which is not only tractable and clean, but also perfectly captures the real world.

I have fallen madly in love and will marry the authors based on this sentence alone.
posted by medusa at 5:25 PM on July 10 [14 favorites]

27 Jennifers
posted by hydropsyche at 5:55 PM on July 10 [2 favorites]

My mom named me after Candance Bergen's character in The Wind and the Lion, but also, she was a hippie. It's a slightly more common name now but yeah, growing up in the '80s, it absolutely was not.

Other than having to clarify it every time ("yes, like the Garden"), I don't really think that much about it. It's just a name. I've had it my whole life, after all.

Hilariously, though, in a place where I worked, I had people who've met me before call me "Eve" (ok, same general idea, I guess), "Ellen" (several of the same letters) or "Edith" (which, fine, I get mishearing my name that way). The one thing I can't understand is the time at Starbucks where my name became "Katie."

One of my good friends is a Sarah and she was sharing some of the historical nicknames for Sarah that she learned, including her favorite, Sadie. I think I said something like "I'm not sure how you get from Sarah to Sadie" and she shrugged and said "well, Sarah was a common name. They had to come up with variations." Fair point.

We definitely had many Sara(h)s and Katies and especially Jennifers. We also had many Tiffanys. My elementary school bestie was a Tiffany and instead of doing the whole "Tiffany +Last Initial" did "Tiffany +Middle Name" which was that much cooler.

I think a lot about names so this is fun.

(My middle name is Addeline, which is a family name. I used to hate it as a child but I love it now.)
posted by edencosmic at 5:56 PM on July 10 [3 favorites]

The Society for Preventing Parents from Naming Their Children Jennifer and the 27 Jennifers have thoughts on this.

Also note The Dave Conspiracy.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:00 PM on July 10 [3 favorites]

Just for fun, the sheer number of duplicated names in my current show: 3 Jennifers, Kaitlyn and Caitlin, Elizabeth and Lizzy, two Julias. Possibly throwing in Erik the regular person vs. Eric the show character.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:03 PM on July 10 [1 favorite]

I also love this sentence: "For instance, a parent might anticipate the name “Kate” would be a pleasantly traditional yet unique name with only moderate popularity. They would be wrong."
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:05 PM on July 10 [5 favorites]

If you want more uniqueness just portmanteau two regular names together. Like Veronifer, Svenjamin, Perstephanie, Fredinand, Stupert, Flyncent, Evelydia, Carolive, Calebeneezer, etc. Guaranteed good results.
posted by aubilenon at 6:10 PM on July 10 [42 favorites]

So, we named our child a unique (in Chile) name, and it worked, EXCEPT a famous person used the same name for their child a few years after us and we still get people saying, "Oh, like Famous Person's child????"
posted by signal at 6:18 PM on July 10 [3 favorites]

Interestingly, no men involved in this paper..why?
posted by PheasantlySurprised at 6:20 PM on July 10

They probably couldn't find one named Kate.
posted by zeptoweasel at 6:24 PM on July 10 [28 favorites]

An Abundance of Katherine’s: The Game Theory of Baby Naiming

This reminds me of a sitcom I used to watch called Teachers. The main cast were all in an improv group called The Katydids, and their names were Caitlin, Katy, Cate, Kate, Katie and Kathryn :-)

Game theory, shmame theory.

As The Katydids knew instinctively, every 17 years a vast population of parents are compelled to name their newborn daughters some variant of Katherine for reasons no one has been able to explain.
posted by jamjam at 6:32 PM on July 10 [7 favorites]

Interestingly, no men involved in this paper..why?

Liam, Liam, Liam, Liam, and LeighAm are working on a counter-theory, while Aiden, Hayden, Brayden, Scrayden, Playden, Wolfden, Jaden, Jayden, J-Dynn, Aden, Breighdynne, and Q-Bert are working on the name mutation side of the problem.

See also r/tragedeigh subject to usual reddit warning
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 6:33 PM on July 10 [9 favorites]

My choices: either 'Peanut Hamper', because it is mathematically perfect, or else 'Shud' to honor the blobfish side of my future child's family.

30 Helens agree with me.
posted by zaixfeep at 6:42 PM on July 10 [5 favorites]

Also, it reminded me of the Kids in the Hall: These Are the Daves I Know and Thirty Helens Agree .

And yet there is no Kathie (with a “K”) listed in the authors.
posted by TedW at 6:50 PM on July 10

When we were debating the naming of our second, I had this exact thought -- that someone should formally model naming preferences as a strategic game, with people having different preferences for name uniqueness. This article is funny and silly, but I think there's something there!

(also the authorship scheme of this paper seems spiritually connected to the naming convention to the paper "A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors" )
posted by dismas at 6:56 PM on July 10 [2 favorites]

And yet I've never heard of a Baby Naming Tournament...

Josh Fight: : Whoever wins gets to keep the name.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 7:38 PM on July 10 [2 favorites]

In my second grade class of 20 kids, there were five Johns and five Jennys.
posted by notoriety public at 7:49 PM on July 10 [2 favorites]

I've dated and/or married 4 Kates. Six of my friends married Kates, too. And I'm on my second, maybe third Rachel.

But still they have nothing on Mikes.
posted by es_de_bah at 8:00 PM on July 10 [1 favorite]

It's always surprised me how popular my name has been, both in the year of my birth and recently. It's been in the top 20 forever, and usually in the top 10 or higher. Yet I feel like I don't meet many people with my name, and I didn't have a surfeit of them in my grade during my school years, even though it was the second most popular name the year of my birth.
posted by mollweide at 8:11 PM on July 10

Figure 7 is very good. So is the bottom of figure 8.
posted by biogeo at 9:41 PM on July 10

hah! that parents are myopic, perfectly knowledgeable agents who pick a name based solely on its “uniqueness”

as a 1st time new parent you're famously not well plugged into the names currently being chosen by other parents, which is why our son Max was one of 3 in his class
posted by mbo at 9:47 PM on July 10 [8 favorites]

I attended a lot of weird, culty Christian schools as a kid, and it had some very specific naming conventions. There were so many Rachels, Hannahs and Leahs that we couldn't even do last initial, and had to monkeywrench our own deed name framework. Leah With The Plaits, Bug Allergy Rachel, Broken Nose Hannah. Boys were heavy on the Joshes for reasons that elude me. You can tell they were culty, not Catholic, because I don't think I had a single Mary or Joseph in there, despite my family having a reasonable crop of them over the years.

On the flip side, there were a few good solid Bible names of less common use, including a Zebediah who was the angriest kid I had the misfortune to be locked in a classroom alongside.
posted by Jilder at 9:47 PM on July 10 [5 favorites]

I just made sure that each of my children had a different first initial to any other family member

wish we'd done this, biggest mistake in naming we made was giving both kids names starting with the same letter
posted by mbo at 9:54 PM on July 10 [2 favorites]

> Interestingly, no men involved in this paper..why?

"Simon Shindler contributed significantly to the aesthetic of Figure 7, but could not be named an author for obvious reasons".
posted by paduasoy at 10:49 PM on July 10 [9 favorites]

A song about names Fredward.
posted by boilermonster at 11:35 PM on July 10

In 1948 physicist George Gamow and his student Ralph Alpher had some ideas about the creation of chemical elements. They recruited Hans Bethe solely to launch the Alpher Bethe Gamow paper.
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:12 AM on July 11 [7 favorites]

Katie Conf was already mentioned, so I’ll add Sarah Pinsker’s “and then there were n minus one”, in which a Sarah in one universe invents multiverse travel and invites all of the other possible Sarahs to a conference. The check in desk is rather chaotic since every one has the same name…
posted by autopilot at 12:23 AM on July 11 [3 favorites]

Oh, and until last year, there were more Fortune 500 CEOs named John than women.
posted by autopilot at 12:27 AM on July 11 [4 favorites]

And there’s Project Steve, too.
posted by nat at 12:46 AM on July 11

A-and Generation Connie
posted by chavenet at 4:54 AM on July 11 [1 favorite]

Also, squid/dinosaur charting for the win
posted by chavenet at 4:56 AM on July 11 [3 favorites]

as a 1st time new parent you're famously not well plugged into the names currently being chosen by other parents, which is why our son Max was one of 3 in his class

Yup. The “nice old-fashioned name not in wide use” to “top twenty baby name” pipeline is real.
posted by eirias at 5:14 AM on July 11 [4 favorites]

I'm a Smith. One morning when I was in high school, my mom showed me an article in the newspaper about the most common first names in the U.S. (at that moment, anyway.) Mine was at the top. Numbers two and three were my sister and one of my brothers. (My oldest brother's name, while very common, was apparently not in the top ten, anyway.)

So I started going by my middle name (which I still do now, close to thirty years later.)

Of course, almost immediately following that decision, a teen TV drama became a big hit for a while that kind of sullied that name for years, but at least people remembered it.
posted by Navelgazer at 5:37 AM on July 11 [2 favorites]

I was surrounded by Sarahs and Rachels in college. This was a function not just of the times but of my falling in with a Jewish friend group.

My name is in that sweet spot -- fairly old and not too common but common enough. The trouble is that famous women with the name are tragic or polarizing, not people you'd like to name a baby after. There's one saint, but she's obscure and a nepotism hire by saint standards. I even saw a thread long ago of men discussing how you should never trust a woman with my name. Considering the caliber of dude on display, that was as proud as I've ever been of it.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:57 AM on July 11 [5 favorites]

Perhaps my favorite excerpt:

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 list. Another ERA is the Mayfly Parenthood Assumption, in which all parents perish immediately upon naming their child, which makes the math substantially easier.

posted by Navelgazer at 6:13 AM on July 11 [11 favorites]

I am a Josh married to an Amy. In her family and in mine there are so many people sharing names, her brother and most of my cousins went by nicknames instead of their own actual name to avoid being confused with an aunt, uncle, cousin, parent, or grandparent.

When naming our tadpole we very deliberately focused on names that had never been in the top 1000 most popular in the Social Security index. Caveat: needed to be a name that had a more common nickname, to avoid the trap of sentencing him to having to spell out his name for all eternity. So far success, in 15 years we have met only 1 or 2 kids with the same name, and quite a few with the same nickname.

I would love to publish something like this but my collaborators are way too serious about our science to even consider including a dinosaur graph.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:14 AM on July 11 [7 favorites]

With all the pitfalls, maybe there's something to be said for the Southern WASP custom of naming a girl "Mary [Mother's Maiden Name]" or "[Mother's Maiden Name] Anne" and just calling the whole thing out every time so that nobody thinks to shorten it. It's unique and feminine, anyway. (Other suffixes to use are Beth, Grace, and of course Kathryn.)
posted by Countess Elena at 6:47 AM on July 11 [4 favorites]

Uncommon names (like mine) have certain advantages and disadvantages. My name is so uncommon only 3 people that I'm aware of share it, and one is my dad. So it used to be useful for spam phone calls, but nobody even answers those anymore.

My name was never pronounced correctly for any public event, like sports. I can't buy it on a keychain in a tourist shop. I look for Bort instead. It's far more likely. Those may seem minor to an adult but to a kid they kind of suck.

I have 2 kids, one with a moderately popular name and one with a relatively common name but not common enough to buy on a keychain at a tourist shop. The one with the not common name is also never pronounced correctly, but there are kids in the grade above and below at her school that share her name.

My kid with the common name actually loves her same name crew - it's like seeing someone wearing your same shirt- you instantly become family.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:45 AM on July 11 [1 favorite]

Also naming children does involve some scheming and game theory, in that you can't call dibs on a name before you are pregnant, and if you name your kid the same thing as a close relative names their child, you are questionable, as a member of a society. You probably shower after every poop.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:53 AM on July 11 [2 favorites]

Also funny the collection of Kat*s got their equation to be K* A -t (not the correct notation) but since they are all spelled different after that, couldn't get to 'e', 'ie', or 'y', and they hung poor Cathy out to dry.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:59 AM on July 11

I assume this paper sets the record for "most authors all with the same first name". Here's a paper "A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors" by four authors named Goodman, which as far as I know is tied for the last-name record - they mention another paper with four coauthors with the same name but that's two brothers and their wives.

I would also imagine there are same papers with multiple unrelated Vietnamese co-authors all named Nguyen, or (slightly less likely, just because of how the frequencies work out) Koreans named Kim, Park, or Lee.
posted by madcaptenor at 8:31 AM on July 11

We sweated over my kid's male name only for her to grow up, announce her true gender, and pick a girl name she liked ( no interest at all in any girl name we considered). Which is nice in that it takes us off the hook.

I wish we had a Free Name Change option for all kids at like, 18. Would be nice to streamline that paperwork.
posted by emjaybee at 8:45 AM on July 11 [11 favorites]

Continuing down this rabbit hole, I did find a paper by Kim, Kim, and Kim, Effect of Chinese characters on machine learning for Chinese author name disambiguation: A counterfactual evaluation. Apparently disambiguating Chinese names (especially post-transliteration) is an active research area.
posted by madcaptenor at 9:29 AM on July 11 [2 favorites]

My kid with the common name actually loves her same name crew - it's like seeing someone wearing your same shirt- you instantly become family.

Unless you're a Sean, then you are constantly battling the pretenders Shawn and Shaun
posted by Ferreous at 9:35 AM on July 11 [1 favorite]

Unless you're a Sean, then you are constantly battling the pretenders Shawn and Shaun

And Shawn's not above biting, so you've gotta watch out for that.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:39 AM on July 11 [1 favorite]

I've had to come up with nicknames for people. The Sarahs I've known over the years were named for hair colors or job positions. Then Redhead Sarah decided to go blonde, which has already been taken, and Shorthaired Sarah's grown her hair out....

I note I'm being called "Rainbow Jen" these days, for the same sort of logic.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:49 AM on July 11

I knew what I wanted to name a hypothetical daughter since I was 18 years old. It was easy to pronounce/spell, a little bit old fashioned, and hadn't been in the top 100 names in over 50 years.

I didn't have a daughter until almost 20 years later. And now...her name is definitely in the top 50 and there are three others with her same name in her grade/the one above it. I'm still salty about this. I waited a whole generation to have a kid and the names swung around back to the feminine old-fashioned conventions. Two of her best friends are Elenore and Matilda.

At least her last name is still pretty darned unique. I am literally the only person in the United States (and honestly probably the world) with my full name. It's actually pretty fun. A little bit depressing sometimes to google myself, but still overall fun.
posted by sharp pointy objects at 9:49 AM on July 11 [3 favorites]

My social circle used to have a Sara Four and Sarah Five after the number of letters in their names.
posted by madcaptenor at 9:56 AM on July 11 [4 favorites]

About six months before Frozen was released, my sister named her newborn daughter Elsa. She just liked the sound of it.

Reader, this was an unfortunate choice.

Cf. Daenerys.
posted by The Bellman at 11:46 AM on July 11

Since I have the most common last name in the country, my ex and I determined we wouldn't name our girls with anything on the top 100 baby names circa 2009 and 2012. Nothing too out there, just unique enough. Then the world's most famous hip-hop couple picked our first daughter's name for their own kid. And it turned out her pediatrician had another patient with exactly the same name born just a month later. And then Games of Thrones went with a variation of our second's name for one of their main characters. In summary, all naming strategies truly are futile.
posted by gottabefunky at 12:37 PM on July 11 [5 favorites]

My friendgroup as a young adult had so many repeated names we had a nickname collectively: Maladopadae, for Mikes and Lauras and Davids of Potomac and Derwood and Everywhere.
posted by tavella at 12:41 PM on July 11 [3 favorites]

Oh, wait, it was "and Wherever" not Everywhere, so Maladopadawe.
posted by tavella at 12:52 PM on July 11

When the first baby arrived Mrs.43rd and I couldn't agree on names. Then we realized that we both have the same initials, and decided to use that to guide our choice. Fast forward, and there are now five of us with the same initials. The three offspring (youngest now 33) still can't decide if it's amusing or irritating.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 2:17 PM on July 11 [4 favorites]

Oh, and I once worked with a guy who was obsessed with Ancient Greece and Rome, so much so that one of his children was christened Hannibal Tiberius.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 2:20 PM on July 11

Reading the paper... As a simple model it seems useful and interesting! And really not that much less realistic than most mathematical models (and probably more so than most of them in economics.)

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 list. Another ERA is the Mayfly Parenthood Assumption, in which all parents perish immediately upon naming their child, which makes the math substantially easier.
[...]
If 𝑔(𝜇)=𝜇, then we say the name with proportion 𝜇 is satisfied. Ideally, we would like every name to be satisfied, or 𝑔(𝜇)=𝜇 for all 𝜇∈[0,1]. However, that would give us a distribution with total probability > 1, which is the sort of thing that makes statisticians sad.
[...]
The science of naming has a long and illustrious history that we didn’t bother to look at. Instead, we arbitrarily assigned a new(?) model to describe how parents ought to name their children - namely probabilistically. This model has interesting implications, most interestingly that all naming strategies are futile.

posted by OnceUponATime at 2:57 PM on July 11 [3 favorites]

Yup. The “nice old-fashioned name not in wide use” to “top twenty baby name” pipeline is real.

I always, since childhood, wanted to name a baby after my beloved great aunt Hazel. When my ex and I had our kids, he veto'd Hazel as being too old-fashioned. People immediately began naming babies Hazel and I know several of them. I can't quite decide whether I missed out on the opportunity to name the baby what I wanted to name it, or dodged a bullet.

Three of our four children no longer use the names they were given at birth. The fourth loves the name we gave him.
posted by Well I never at 1:52 AM on July 12 [3 favorites]

With all the pitfalls, maybe there's something to be said for the Southern WASP custom of naming a girl "Mary [Mother's Maiden Name]" or "[Mother's Maiden Name] Anne"

That second option would have made my name "King Anne." I like it.
posted by JanetLand at 6:37 AM on July 12 [3 favorites]