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Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

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Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#41

Post by Kurtz79 »

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…

Heh, seeing Bernard as common name for Electrical Engineer made me think of Maniac Mansion...

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#45

Post by ryanmim »

Okay so normally I hate people that bring up gender, but there were some interesting correlations between professions and gender here. Assuming there aren't many guys named Sue. For example, meteorologist: 100% male. When I think meteorologist I think newscast in front of a greens creen so this is perhaps a case of my terrible misconceptions showing.

Also, WHY are things separated by color and opacity? If we're going by opacity, apparently one of the most populous and important professions is...race car driver. Really? That's one of the few professions on that huge infographic that is at maximum opacity?

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#46

Post by crazygringo »

> Here's a chart with 6 of the names that are the most disproportionately common in 37 professions.

It doesn't say they're the top 6, just that they're "6 of" -- and having worked with a lot of similar data sets in the past, the results here feel a little overly edited (i.e. exaggerated, stereotyped) to me. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, though.

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#48

Post by eitally »

toupeetape wrote: post #35
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…

That is interesting and I am sure there is a good point there but meteorologist is also a profession requiring a high education level. Yet the meteorologist list (Bill, Joe, Jim, Jeff, Mike, Scott) is way more similar to the football coach list to the point where 3 of the names are the same.

Perhaps it's because individuals in public-facing professions/roles tend to favor shortened versions of their names? I think this is largely why the media makes fun of Benedict [Timothy Carlton] Cumberbatch.

For example: http://benedictcumberbatchgenerator.tumblr.com/

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#49

Post by VLM »

toupeetape wrote: post #35
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…

That is interesting and I am sure there is a good point there but meteorologist is also a profession requiring a high education level. Yet the meteorologist list (Bill, Joe, Jim, Jeff, Mike, Scott) is way more similar to the football coach list to the point where 3 of the names are the same.

Stage names. No newsreader on a newscast is going to say "Thanks for that great lasagna recipe, now lets talk to Ebenezer Ulysses about tomorrow's rain", they're going to get a stage name of "Bennie" in that case.

Re: Disproportionately Common Names by Profession

#50

Post by Bedon292 »

teamhappy wrote: post #22
kornakiewicz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

> Well, you're not right. I think I am, but I might be wrong on that one too. Given a pool of 10 people to hire from where 6 people are named Arnold and 4 are named shawn Shawn, wouldn't you expect that same relation to show in a specific profession? You can, of course, go ahead and compare those relations. So, if there only were 5 race car drivers in the world and 4 of them were named Arnold that would be noteworthy…

I think their data is going the other direction. It is not 1.9% of Accountants are Arnolds. Its 1.9% of Arnolds are Accountants.

You would expect that the percent of each profession by name should be the same. So if there are 25 professions, then within any given name you should have 4% going to each professions. So 4% of Arnolds should be a profession, and 4% of Shawns should also have the same profession. That is not what the data shows though. Within any given name there is a tendency towards the professions the chart shows.

This definitely does not account for location, birthdays, etc. But it is still interesting.

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