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Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

verdantlabs.com

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Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#11

Post by learnstats2 »

JohnE008 wrote: post #5

After we tackled gender inequalities, we can move on to name inequalities. How about introducing name-quotas, that ought to fix the problem.

I gather you're being sarcastic, but high name inequality is just another illustration of a lack of social mobility.

People of a certain social class are more likely to name their child certain names, and those children are more likely to grow up into particular professions.

Name inequality represents clear evidence against the existence of a meritocracy.

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#12

Post by tarpherder »

Its interesting to see the difference in type of names between Football Coach (Dan, Bill, Mike, Jim, Rich, Steve) and Electrical Engineer (Bernard, Eugene, Edwin, Charles, Alfred, Harvey). Short (one vowel each), common, English versus longer (two vowels each) French/"Posh" English names. Correlation between the names and background/educative level seems likely?

Songwriter is interesting too: 4 out of 5 end with a variation of "y".

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#13

Post by golemotron »

JohnE008 wrote: post #5

After we tackled gender inequalities, we can move on to name inequalities. How about introducing name-quotas, that ought to fix the problem.

You're missing the fact that we can see gender inequalities in this data. All of the disproportionate names for fitness instructors are female. Either there's much wider variance of male names for fitness instructors or there's terrible gender disparity in that profession.

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#15

Post by longlivegnu »

tarpherder wrote: post #12

Its interesting to see the difference in type of names between Football Coach (Dan, Bill, Mike, Jim, Rich, Steve) and Electrical Engineer (Bernard, Eugene, Edwin, Charles, Alfred, Harvey). Short (one vowel each), common, English versus longer (two vowels each) French/"Posh" English names. Correlation between the names and background/educative level seems likely? Songwriter is interesting too: 4 out of 5 end with a va…

I do agree people with French/"Posh" English names are probably more educated and contribute more to society based upon this poor correlation

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#17

Post by jMyles »

This seems fairly easy to explain: Many given names are passed down through family lines, and many families pass on knowledge, habits, and even professions from generation to generation.

There are lots of common surnames that demonstrate this - Taylor, Cooper, Cobbler, Smith, and so on. Why not given names?

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#18

Post by kornakiewicz »

teamhappy wrote: post #8
proveanegative wrote: post #2

Apparently they don't state what "disproportionately" is supposed to mean. If that is indeed the case I doubt much valid insight can be derived from this chart.

"In our sample of two and a half million people, a whopping 1.9% of Arnolds are accountants. Contrast that with just 0.55% of Shanes. Arnolds therefore appear to have a much higher tendency to be accountants than Shanes." http://www.verdantlabs.com/blog/2014/12/30/names-by-professi... You see where this is going. If you correlate the data with the popularity of names in general, you'll find that Arnold is a much more…

Well, you're not right. Almost 2% of Arnolds is more than 0.5% of Shanes, no matter how much there're Arnolds and Shanes. If you take 100 Arnolds and 100 Shanes there will be (statistically) 2 Arnolds and "half of Shane".

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#19

Post by colanderman »

teamhappy wrote: post #3

> People with these names are more likely than others to have these professions. Shouldn't it say: "People with these names happen to be in those professions more often than others"? Anyway, there are a couple of fun ones in there, but I'll let you figure those out yourself. Unfortunately neither my name nor my profession are covered — I'm not quite sure what to make of that. :/ --- They use the same language in thei…

EDIT2: OK folks we're smart, let's use MATH.

Take above quote, which compares "1.9% of Arnolds are accountants" to the "0.55% of Shanes [are accountants]". They're implying that the probability of being an accountant (J), given that ones name (N) is Arnold, is above the expected probability of being an accountant in general. So they're looking for a high P[J|N]/P[J].

Now compare with what we were expecting to see. We assumed the chart showed, for a given job, names which had a higher incidence than normal. i.e., we're looking for a high P[N|J]/P[N].

Guess what. P[J|N]/P[J]=P[N|J]/P[N] by Bayes' Theorem [1]. These are EXACTLY the same metric! So their technique, and the chart, is correct. (And my original post, below, was wrong.)

(Not saying anything about causation here, and I don't think they were either.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem

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Yes, that is completely backward. 99% of Arnolds could go into farming, yet still the 1% who go into accounting dominate that field, and hence show up on this chart.

EDIT: but you missed the first half of that quote: "In our sample of two and a half million people, a whopping 1.9% of Arnolds are accountants. Contrast that with just 0.55% of Shanes." So I think the quote is correct. Makes me wonder if their chart is backward. (i.e., they put "Arnold" under "Accountant" because Arnolds are likely to be accountants, not because accountants are likely to be Arnolds, as the grouping implies).

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#20

Post by kornakiewicz »

Some time ago, I saw a paper when some scientists find that people often tends to have place of live and job which is somehow connected with their names eg. there's more Denises who works as dentists or Louises in Louisiane. I also noticed that in my country (Poland) there's quite more people working in IT with names or surnames which begins on K (Polish word for computer is "komputer"), I'm the case.
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