Some doctors I know have done this almost deliberately. My favourite is probably Dr Wombwell... who decided to become a gynaecologist.
When I still lived in Berlin, there was a psychiatrist in my district named Totenkopf (dead head).
Nominative determinism in hospital medicine (2015)
61–69 of 69 posts
Re: Nominative determinism in hospital medicine (2015)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's almost certainly a simulation. If you live in apartments, how often have you seen your neighbors do laundry or bring home groceries? There's also this (short clip, start at 2:00). Note the reference to "The Big Lie": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs6UcgiDwg0&t=120 A 1953 German book's leader of Mars is called the "Elon": https://twitter.com/tobyliiiiiiiiii/status/13441550614258237... I think Roko's Basilisk wi…
If you live in apartments, how often have you seen your neighbors do laundry or bring home groceries? Reminds me a real story where a guy found a USB stick nearby a city building. It contained a shivering warning about your neighbors. The stick owner lived in that building and some day asked himself this question and tried to watch what his neighbors do routinely. He followed some of them and found out that they simp…
"True story? I couldn't swear to every detail but it's certainly true that it is a story."
Re: Nominative determinism in hospital medicine (2015)
#63It always struck me as ironic that one of history's greatest fraudsters, who made off with billions in other people's money, had the last name "Madoff."
Re: Nominative determinism in hospital medicine (2015)
#64When my wife and I lived in Brooklyn, her optometrist's name was Dr. Vivien Vu and her dentist's name was Dr. Samantha Ifill (I kid you not -- look them up). I haven't read the paper yet, but my theory is simply that when a name matches the person's job we notice it; all the other times when it doesn't match we don't notice.
No, the paper analyses the count/frequency of profession-related surnames in a database, so it's not really dealing with that.
But in day-to-day I'm sure that's true; and why so many people who could not tell the name of their currentdentist, accountant, etc., still know the name of their doctor Dr. Medicine 10 years later. It just sticks as an anecdote.
Re: Nominative determinism in hospital medicine (2015)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Nice. That theory seems quite a bit larger in scope. And intuitively it makes sense. What I had in mind was a more localized version of this which is sort of like a game of telephone within a language. It's not surprising that one's native language would affect the way one looks at things. But what seems more surprising is that choosing to express an idea one way vs. another within the same language can even end up c…
I agree, which is why I feel it's worthwhile to expand one's vocabulary, and expose yourself to a variety of communication styles. It's so subtle, it's hard to tell how much your choice of words influences your thinking, or how you process the world around you. More tools in the language toolbox can literally be mind-expanding.
Re: Nominative determinism in hospital medicine (2015)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The possibility of gravitational waves was discussed in 1893 by Oliver Heaviside" I was trying to find a motel once and was directed onto "Sample Rd". The street was real, but when I got to the supposed location of the motel, I didn't see anything.
He also has a function named after him that looks like it has one heavy side: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaviside_step_function
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Re: Nominative determinism in hospital medicine (2015)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The possibility of gravitational waves was discussed in 1893 by Oliver Heaviside" I was trying to find a motel once and was directed onto "Sample Rd". The street was real, but when I got to the supposed location of the motel, I didn't see anything.
He also has a function named after him that looks like it has one heavy side: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaviside_step_function
If I'm reading that right, then when considering the general function, 0 is grouped with negative numbers, but when considering integers only ("Discrete form" a ways down) then 0 is grouped with positive numbers (that is, the output is 1).
How odd.
Re: Nominative determinism in hospital medicine (2015)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's almost certainly a simulation. If you live in apartments, how often have you seen your neighbors do laundry or bring home groceries? There's also this (short clip, start at 2:00). Note the reference to "The Big Lie": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs6UcgiDwg0&t=120 A 1953 German book's leader of Mars is called the "Elon": https://twitter.com/tobyliiiiiiiiii/status/13441550614258237... I think Roko's Basilisk wi…
The groceries thing is funny, but it's really just "what's the likelihood that in X years of living in the same place, your random 5 minutes out of the week are the same as your neighbor's random 5 minutes of the week".
It is actually not random. Most people do groceries on a relatively consistent schedule, for example, on Tuesday at 4:20, because it is the day you leave work early and it is a convenient time to go to the grocery store on your way back home.
It means that you can see your neighbors do groceries almost every week if your schedules match, or never if they don't.
I noticed that with people I met in the elevator. Some people I met almost every other day, others, never. Since the beginning of the pandemic, things changed, with remote work and constantly changing policies and restrictions, things became much more random, and I meet more people, but less often.
Re: Nominative determinism in hospital medicine (2015)
#69Dr. Harry C. Beaver, MD, obstetrics and gynecology in Gainesville, Virginia: https://health.usnews.com/doctors/harry-beaver-784569