Would a Rose Smell as Sweet?

What is in the power of a name? What's the dispute on the social effects of names? Does naming your possessions create an emotional bond?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
the podcast that looks at the future and says, I've
been through the desert on a horse with no name.
I'm Jonathan Strickland and Lauren Pokmon and I'm Joe McCormick.

(00:22):
And today we're gonna talk about the future of naming
and just kind of names in general, and why names
are important and why we put significance on them and
do we put more significance on them than we actually realize? Uh?
So to start off, let's just talk about the power
of names. Now. This is something that pops up again
and again in folklore, right, and we are all familiar

(00:44):
with various fairy tales, like of course rumble Stiltskin being
a big one, about how having someone's name gives you
some form of influence or power over them, that names
themselves are intrinsically powerful. This is an idea that goes
back to prehistoric times. Really, oh sure? And uh and
you know, in Jewish tradition, the idea that saying the

(01:05):
name of God is it is a blasphemy because it
holds so much power that it's dangerous, right if you
go even into more modern UH concepts. So we've got
like a love Craft's idea of hast the unspeakable one
I've obviously just invited because I've actually said his name.
Or if you go even more modern with J. K.

(01:27):
Rowling and UH and Harry Potter, you have you shall
not be named with us. To speak his name would
be to invoke his power or beetlejuice. Yeah, the modern
repels still skin right. You say his name three times
to summon him, and then you can only put him
back down by getting his name out three times again.
Also the Dresden Files Jim Butcher books based highly on

(01:49):
that kind of fame mythology exactly. But you know, if
if you know the true name, then you can get
power over them. But in that case, you not only
have to know what the true name is, you have
to be able to say it the right way. And
someone's true name in that universe changes over time based
upon the person's self perception. You know, how they feel
about themselves. People have always perceived the power of naming

(02:11):
is something that's really important in having mastery over something
like even if if you look in the Hebrew Bible,
in the Book of Genesis Genesis to nineteen, it says,
out of the ground, the Lord God formed every beast
of the field and every bird of the sky, and
brought them to the man to see what we he
would call them. And whatever the man called the living creature,
that was its name. And this is sort of like

(02:32):
this symbolic like giving dominion to the earth, you know.
So the interesting question to me is, I mean, clearly,
in folklore we have ascribed a certain amount of power
to this concept of names and what names are, and
how that can can influence both the person named and
the person who is naming that person, lots of persons

(02:57):
in my world. But let's let's talk about in a
in a less sort of folklore approach, or or even
a philosophical approach. Can there be real social effects to names? So,
you mean, just like a scientifically measurable effect, right, a
quantifiable effect perhaps, or at least you know, is there
any uh indication that names have some sort of actual

(03:21):
power beyond just what we hear in these stories? Well? Yes,
I mean short answer, yes, podcast is over, Go home, everybody. Well,
I mean, I guess we could start with the most
obvious thing, which is that names, obviously will often tell
us something about who a person is, like the culture
they come from, or what their parents were like both

(03:42):
um connote and denote certain things about a person, you know,
perhaps um, where their family is from from right or um,
or what kind of socioeconomic status they come from, or
what gender they are or what what race they come from,
or even if their parents leaned conservative versus liberal, depending
upon some studies. Uh yeah, there's and there's some some

(04:05):
kind of scary research about this sort of thing. There
was a study that Freakonomics did a really good podcast
episode on and we'll see if we can link that
on social and send you over to to our enemies,
not that they're we love the freakonomics guys. Um that
that found that. Okay, So so there are there are
traditionally in America, traditionally white names and traditionally black names,

(04:27):
and back before the Equal Rights movement, it was it
was kind of a mishmash of of everything that what
your name was was not so much of a racial signifier.
But through the nineteen seventies that began changing, mostly due
to the Black Power movement and the way that that blacks,
especially in racially racially isolated neighborhoods, were thinking about themselves

(04:50):
and and so you know, it's it's it's a really
hot button issue, but it's it's fascinating in a way
because so so all of these studies have been done
through the eighties and as recently as two thousand four
that found that if identical resumes marked with black names
or white names were sent to employers, the white names

(05:10):
got more interview opportunities um. And in that one from
two thousand four, white sounding names had to send ten
resumes to get a call back, black sounding names fifteen resumes,
and that number went down for white names on better resumes,
like more developed resumes, but it didn't change that much
for the black names with better resumes. Right, so, on

(05:30):
the surface, that seems to suggest there's at least some
level of institutionalized discrimination going on. Also that that gap
didn't decrease for black names who gave addresses in better,
more more affluent, or more um educated or wider neighborhoods,
And it didn't even change in companies that used affirmative

(05:51):
action UM. The only the only place that the gap
did lesson was in certain Chicago neighborhoods that had higher
black populations. Another thing I found interesting in that Freakonomics
podcast that kind of relates to this, actually directly relates
to this, was the the discovery that when a a
a black scholar, was typing her name into Google, a

(06:13):
an ad that popped up that was all about getting
background information upon uh, the person whose name you type
in pato and said do you want to see this
person's arrest record? And she said, you know, it was
a shocking revelation because she's never been arrested, and it
was one of those experiences like, you know, you immediately
get anxiety, You think, well, what how can this this
incorrect information about me be out there on the internet.

(06:37):
When it turns, it turns out it was a eight
and add just for getting info about whomever you put
in there. And it turns and if you were to
put in other names, they discovered she discovered with a
colleague of hers, when they would put in other names
that were not uh, it didn't seem to come from
a black culture, it would give you the same ad
but different wording. So instead of saying a rest record,

(06:58):
to be like, do you want to see so and
so's background right, Uh yeah, she she works at Harvard
and UM and they found that that arrest kind of
language would come up of the time in UM strongly
black suggestive names and only zero to six the time
and white suggestive names. Yes. So the question there is
where is this apparently discriminatory uh spin coming from? Like

(07:22):
how is that coming into play? And according to Google,
it was not their part. They said they had no
no role in choosing what keywords would pull up one
version of the ad versus another, and even according to
the advertiser, they said that they had put nothing in place.
But it may be that's just the behavior of users
who click on one type of ad more frequently than

(07:45):
the other, and as a result, the algorithms that figure
out what is the most likely version of the ad
to get clicks. Remember the the algorithm is just designed
to try and get people to click on the ad. Uh.
May have been that through behaviors of people who are
actually using the service, that's why it's showing one version

(08:06):
more than another, which means that it may not be
a discriminatory thing on part of Google, which is the
platform or the advertising agency which is providing the ad.
But the actual users, So no matter who is at fault,
it's a disturbing trend. Right. The positive thing that came
out of and and the study that freakonomics was talking

(08:27):
about specifically was a working study published in two thousand
three by the National Bureau of Economic Research UM. It
found that having a distinctly black name did not have
a negative impact on life outcomes. Um, which is you know,
the a portion of this very sad and scary kind
of topic. Yeah, the findings seemed to be that UM.

(08:52):
Strangely enough, there are short term acute, measurable effects, but
the long term effects don't show up for some reason.
It doesn't seem to determine a person's destiny in the
long haul, right right. Their idea was that once a
person is known to you, you the what what your
name is become significantly less important because you're going to

(09:14):
start judging them based on, you know, what you see
right in front of you and how they act, rather
than what their name is. So this might make a
big difference, say in getting callbacks initially on just a
resume and nothing else, but once you have an interview
or something, it might not make much of a difference
at all. Well, and beyond that, the they go so
far in the Freakonomics podcast to actually mention that, you know,

(09:35):
let's be realistic, how many jobs are filled simply through
the resume process as opposed to networking. Networking is is huge.
I mean, it's one of those things where networking might
even things out. And they even said that the name
may not be so important if you're if you are applying.
Let's say you're a black person applying to a job

(09:55):
where the hiring manager does have some sort of of
race ist attitudes, and if they had received a resume
with a black name that something a name that comes
across as from a black culture, they would have just
put it aside. But let's say you're a black person
who has a name that is not now indicative of
black culture and maybe a name that many people might
associate with white culture. You get called into an interview.

(10:19):
You wouldn't get that job any so it turns you away,
which you know, still shows that there's a an incredibly
unfair bias there. But the point being that the name
itself in that case is not is not the problem.
The problem is the fact that the hiring manager was
a racist. Yeah, I'm wondering these days if the greater

(10:41):
influence of computer algorithms on choosing resumes to filter through
in the first place might start erasing a little bit
of that, one would hope. One would hope that it
would be right well, as as it's looking for for
really quantifiable things that are relevant to the job, you
would hope that that would start to disappear, right, Okay, Well,

(11:03):
so that's an uh an interesting and uh disturbing in
the short term, but it seems better in the long term.
A trend we can identify. But that's you can kind
of see the root cause of that very easily. Well,
it's just racial prejudice. You know, there are people who
harbor really antisocial attitudes and that's being manifest in in

(11:24):
certain hiring practices and stuff like that. But what about
more subtle ways that names might affect the judgments we
make about people. Yeah, you would think, all right, so
we have lots of different cultures represent here on Earth
among humankind, lots of different languages, lots of different ideals
and ideologies. You would think that there there really aren't

(11:45):
any like universal trends, are there? Well, I mean, let's
just look within names that are associated with one culture. Okay, uh,
let's assume that there's no prejudice at play or anything
like that. I mean, does it make a difference whether
your name name is Steve or Harry. It depends on
if someone's calling you or not. I guess it, would

(12:05):
you know, make a difference. Then if your name is Stephen,
they just keep calling you Harry, then you're never gonna
do what they want you to do. I've got something
interesting to pose it here or not positive, I didn't
come up with this idea to present. Okay, I want
you all to um, imagine two shapes. Okay, you need
two shapes or do you have something? I'm going to
describe them. The shape number one, it's a jagged star

(12:30):
kind of shape, all right. Now imagine shape number two
is a rounded, puffy cloud kind of shaped, alright. One
of Now, these shapes have names in the language of
an alien species, and those names are boo bah and

(12:51):
ki ki. Alright, which shape is which? Just intuitively, I
already know the answer to this, So I'm not going
to la. Yeah, I've I've read the psychological study, so
I I so I'm biased, But but I mean, but
I genuinely would say that Kiki has to be the
star shape and Bubba has to be the puffy shape.
Of course, it just seems obvious. I mean it's at

(13:12):
least the population. It seems obviously some of the general population.
I think the numbers changed based on a few different demographics. Yeah, okay.
So this experiment was first done by a German psychologist
named Wolfgang Kohler in nineteen twenty nine and published in
his book Gestalt Psychology Salt, Yeah, and what he found.

(13:36):
He used slightly different words but found basically the same things.
Instead of Kiki saying takete, instead of Bubba saying baluba. Um,
but that's STATICO kind of kind of constant thing going
on for the sharp one and the round kind of
words for sure. Um. And so found that there are
these really strong associations between the sounds and the shapes.

(13:58):
Totally nonsense word, totally abstract shapes. Why should this be
um vs. Ramaschandre and Edward Hubbard repeated a similar basically
did the same experiment again, I think it was in
two thousand one, and they they used kiki and buba
and that they found that among two groups of subjects

(14:19):
interestingly enough, from different language groups. So one was a
group of English speaking college students and one was a
group of Tamil speakers from India, and they found among
both groups of subjects identified this the shapes the same way.
The rounded one was Buba and the jagged one was Kiki.

(14:40):
Which this this is phenomenal when you sit there and
think about how different languages from different parts of the world,
you know, where they don't share a at least they
don't share a common language unless there's some proto language
that we could talk if Tamil comes from Indo European,
lots of languages have really really long ago ancestr But

(15:00):
but you know, considering that like that, like automantapia for
different animals can be so different. But yet when you
hear it, you sort of go, like, no, Jon, that's
absolutely the sound that a cat makes. Okay, that makes
perfect sense. That kel says chazoo. Where's the kel Eastern
Europe apparently? Uh? But no, no, like like, like my

(15:20):
example was going to be more about you know, Asian languages,
where you have intonation, you have a tonality too words
that is, and that's totally different from things that we'd
find in a lot of Western languages where you don't
have to worry about a rising tone or a falling
tone to a word. If I say a word, whether
I'm doing a rising tone or lowering, the tone doesn't

(15:41):
change the meaning of the word. It might make it
sound like I'm asking a question, but I'm not changing
the meaning of the word, whereas in some Asian languages
that's actually the case, where it's not just the pronunciation
but how the inflection is there, and that the whether
or not there's a specific kind of tone. To me,
it's interesting that despite those the sort of very basic

(16:02):
differences in the language, you can still find this commonality. Yeah. Um.
So there are lots of different theories about what might
explain this association. Some say that, uh, well, some focus
on or is it the consonants in the words or
the vowels in the words that cause this, So you
can switch them around and try to mess with that
and see if it changes the result. Um. Some would say,

(16:24):
well is it um? Is it based on the shape
your mouth is making when you say the word, or
something more intrinsic about how the word sounds to you. Um.
All very interesting, but the important takeaway is that words
aren't neutral. I mean, isn't that strange? Just consonants that

(16:45):
have no predefined meaning still suggest things to the mind
in this kind of what's been called like a synesthesia,
like mapping. Interesting. So so even when we don't have
kind of ations like you know, not that many babies
are named Adolph anymore for very very good reasons, or
or Damien, you know, after Rosemary's baby was kind of unpopular.

(17:08):
That would be an association based on history, right exactly.
But these are completely freeform associations, right, So it might
be that a baby named Adolph, even if there'd never
been a bad person named Adolph, there might be a
situation in which, for one reason or another, Adolph sounds
like a positive name to people, or maybe sounds like
a negative one. Yeah, that actually brings me up to

(17:29):
h I was going to talk about some of the
scholarship done on various various concepts around naming, some of
which some of which seems a little vague to me,
but it's probably because I haven't been able to read
the whole paper. In a couple of cases, I did
get the whole paper for many of these, but one specifically,
the first one I wanted to talk about is name
valence and physical attractiveness in Facebook their compensatory effects on

(17:52):
friendship acceptance. So this one I read the abstract, but
I didn't have access to the full article before we
could go into you recording. And the reason why I
call this one a little vague is here's the abstract,
um or at least here's here's what I wrote about
the abstract. They talked about two factors that can influence
whether or not you accept someone's friend request on Facebook. Now,

(18:15):
this is, I guess, assuming that you do not already
know the person. So it's not like some old friend
contacting you. It's someone out of the blue contacting you
on Facebook to be your friend. And that's that's the
definition of your friendship with them. It's a Facebook friend.
He said. The two factors that they were looking at
were attractiveness of the person's photo and the whether or

(18:37):
not their name sounded quote positive or quote negative. I
don't know what positive and negative means, but it's not
defined within the abstract. So without those definitions, I cannot
really say what they're talking about. I mean, were they
going with names that are culturally pleasing in the sense

(18:57):
that they're very popular at a certain time, or that
they are unique names, or that they just sound like
I don't know whether criteria are for positive versus negative,
so I don't know what positive and negative necessarily mean
in the context of this study. However, according to the abstract,
what happened was they found that, uh, the more attractive

(19:19):
a a picture was, the more likely someone would accept
a friend request. The more positive the name, the more
likely someone to accept our friend request, and that if
the name sounded more positive, it could balance out a
picture that was deemed less attractive. To me, this is
kind of tricky because attractive and positive are both very
subjective terms, so I'm not really sure, Like, did they

(19:41):
show this to a robot and the robot gave a
thumbs up for attractive and a thumbs down form I'm sure.
I'm sure that they explained to their methodology. I'm sure,
And I just wasn't able to read all of it.
But when I was able to read, was the name
pronunciation effect why people like Mr Smith more than Mr Cahun? Right?
I I I think I heard about that one Calhoun.
By the way, it's spelled c O l q U

(20:04):
H U O N. And the whole idea is that
people who have names that are more easily pronounced tend
to have a better time of it. It looks like
according to the study, they looked at law firms, and
I looked at where people fell in the hierarchy of
their law firms, and the study said that the people
who had more easily pronounceable names rose higher in their

(20:27):
law firms than people who had more difficult to pronounce names.
Now this whole pronounce easy to pronounce versus difficult to pronounce.
It didn't matter how long the name was. It didn't
matter if the name was was familiar or foreign sounding.
It just mattered whether or not it was easy to pronounce.
So it doesn't, you know, it doesn't mean that someone

(20:48):
who has a last name that wouldn't normally be found
in that region would not rise very quickly compared to others.
It just had to be easy to pronounce. If it
was hard to pronounce, they didn't rise as quickly according
to this study, h which I thought was kind of interesting.
There was another one called it a study in Germany,
which makes sense when you hear the title, It pays

(21:09):
to be Eric Kaiser Uh and this one. They found
that people who had noble sounding last names tended to
have higher UH positions of authority, even if the last
name had no actual connection to any nobility whatsoever. So
if you had a last name like Kaiser, then that
would mean that, you know, you had the potential to

(21:30):
rise more quickly than people who might have a last
name like Becker, for you know, a more common the
equivalent of like if someone named Vanderbilt versus Clampett came
into your office looking for a job. I suppose It's
it's hard to say, because if you're talking about noble
sounding here in the US, you might have a someone
with the last name of prince or king, and I

(21:51):
don't know that that would necessarily work. If they had
a last name of president, who knows, but no, if
they had a last name like that was perhaps a
presidential last name, that might be more akin. It's hard
to say, because you know, Vanderbilts definitely do have a
certain connotation. You know Carnegie would as well. That's sort
of thing. These these big names in UH in in

(22:13):
American history and specifically in financial history in America. UH.
And the last one I looked at was do names matter.
The influence of names on perception about professionals in Spain. Now,
this one was interesting because it actually found that there
did not seem to be a strong correlation between people's
perceptions of a person's ability to do his or her

(22:36):
job and that person's name. So if you had a
name that was difficult to pronounce, or a name that
was by just by the fact the way your name is,
if it sounds like kind of a pun or almost
like a joke, just based on the name, it didn't
mean that they felt that you couldn't do your job
better or worse than anyone else. It had no no effect,

(22:56):
significant effect whatsoever, meaning that at least in this study,
the social effective names was minimal. Now, of course we
should say that all of these, you know, looking at
different studies from around the world, slightly different issues, and
they're all from different cultures, so there could be some
cultural elements at play here, not just you know, you

(23:18):
can't we can't get so objective as to say this
is true for the human condition hands down, doesn't matter what,
and it's all tied into really complex you know, not
only racial or economic or social issues, but a little
bit of all of that and extending to gender as well.
Um uh. An interesting paper I saw out of the
National Bureau of Economic Research as well said that, um,

(23:41):
that whole boy named Sue story is pretty accurate. It
found that boys with female sounding names tended to misbehave
just proportionately upon entry to middle school compared with other
boys their age, and also their own previous behavioral patterns.
And you're you know, like speaking more colloquially. I don't
have specific numbers on this, but um, but you know,
in the publishing industry, there's this perception that people will

(24:03):
read that more people a k A. More men will
read more books written by men than they will buy women.
And therefore you get you know, the publisher telling j. K.
Rowling to use j K instead of Joanne when she
published Harry Potter because they were afraid that little boys
wouldn't pick up a book about a magic dude written
by a woman. These little boys don't deserve when it

(24:23):
gets to the publishing industry, there's all sorts of weird
and wacky rules I could talk about. You know, my
dad's an author and he's written under I think at
least two pseudonyms besides his own. He's written under his
own name as well. And uh, and I think in
at least one of those choices was mandated by his publisher,

(24:44):
so the other one may have been his choice. I can't.
I'll have to talk to him and ask him. I've
never asked him why his his mystery series is written
under a pseudonym. But yeah, it's it's it's kind of
crazy because the publishing industry, like they have people who,
you know, they they're looking into to any way to
boost the numbers of sales. And and one of those
things is saying like, well, if you're known for writing

(25:06):
this kind of book, or you happen to be of
this gender, then this other book buying population is never
going to touch your stuff. So we have right when
when Nora Roberts changed her name to J. D. Rob
to write sci fi action thrillers instead of the normal
romance novels that she writes. All right, So, looking at
all these different studies, there's some that do suggest that
names have at least some social impact. There are others

(25:29):
that say it's not that significant, and it looks like
in the long run, names may have an impact on
that initial reaction, but not necessarily a prolonged impact. Yeah,
one idea I want to float is the possibility that
the effect of naming could become more pronounced in the future,
starting in the present. Um, because what are we talking about. Well,

(25:51):
the good thing we found out about to say the
racial prejudice naming effect was that it didn't seem to
play out in the long term, that it was more
an acute kind of problem. Um. But the long term,
the waste people have come up with explaining that was
about getting to know people and meeting them in person
and stuff like that, and and that would counteract some

(26:11):
of the negative effects. Um. But I wonder how that
might change in an online economy. So in that world
we get back to that study where you know, Unfortunately,
since I didn't have the full thing, I couldn't address
how specific it gets. But if you're talking about a
world where your most of your interactions are through online channels,

(26:32):
whether it's you know, social networking or otherwise, then things
like an attractive photo and a a positive name could
get you further than the alternative. Right. So if that's true,
then we could kind of jump jump into a conclusion
is the wrong way of putting it, but we could
we could draw a conclusion we can at least propose

(26:53):
a hypothesis that a a good name could get you
further uh in a an increasingly online world, that that
would be uh one of those assets that you could
use to get ahead, and that furthermore, your your given
birth name would matter less in that kind of situation
because you could give really any name that you wanted

(27:14):
to on the internet. I mean, also, changing your name
in the United States anyway, is a pretty easy legal proposition.
I mean, it's it's it's relatively inexpensive, right, It's it's
not it's not something that requires a huge amount of legwork. Um,
I mean there is some because there's paperwork you have
to do in order to have your your records reflect

(27:35):
your new name. You can't can't just just jump off
the grid and uh and create a new identity for yourself,
despite what numerous movies will tell you. Sure, although I
think that that's getting into a section that we're going
to talk about a little bit later. I think right now,
we were wanting to talk a little bit about how
how we name um inanimate objects. Yeah, so, do you

(27:56):
guys own anything like own any electronics or or equipment
or anything that you've given a name to. My wife
had a van named Gladys. Okay, Gladys or Gladows. The
van is not a lie. Yeah, it's my my car.
My car has a name. It's a Billy the don
Treader Billy. Then, Lauren, you said you've you've named most

(28:21):
of your views. I've named all of my cars. Yes,
and what's happened to all of them? Besides Billy the
don Tredder. They've gotten totaled. So Lauren has a complicated
two of them due to my own fault looks it
was a number of years ago and my insurance rates
are dropping. So wait, wait, only two of them, you're
I'm not going to ask how many. That's that's between
that's between you and you. But no, it's It's funny

(28:43):
because one of the reasons why we wanted to bring
this up is this idea of naming something creates a
different kind of connection. It's not just this is this
thing I own you. You're giving it kind of an identity.
You know, you really are giving it an identity, which
means that you might have you could, at least in
my mind, develop an emotional attachment to this possession beyond

(29:07):
what just saying like this is mine. It may be
that you feel for this thing. Absolutely. I mean names
are a human trait and and anthropomorphism is ascribing non
human things with human traits. So when we name anything
from you know, from our pets, to our lamps, to
our cars, etcetera, toasters, room bas um, you you're you're

(29:28):
you're describing them as being worthy of care and consideration.
Of course, the funny thing is almost nobody names their
toasters or their lamps, but I think a lot of
people name their room bas well. I think that anything
that that has that motion element, like like if it
seems to be acting under its own appears to be animate, right,
because I mean toasters do move. I mean a couple
parts of them will move. But the documentary Ghostbusters too,

(29:51):
they move along. But I can see naming that toast. Um. Yeah,
some there's a study, and I don't have it in
front of me that that a certain number of of
crazy Roomba fans had actually named It was like around
two thirds. That's a pretty high number of a relatively
small sample size, right, Yeah, it was a small sample
that was among thirty committed room by users, twenty one

(30:13):
of them gave their robots names. So that small sample,
but two thirds of them. And I think it's fair
to say in our experience, like most people who have
room bas for some reason or another, name them. A
lot of them ascribe, they give them gender to. Yeah,
there's this there's this chapter that I that I read
from a book called Make It So Interaction Design Lessons

(30:34):
from Science Fiction that was talking about how, um, people
give computers human motivations, ages, genders, and and interact with
them through human social keys, um, you know, with with
persuasion and flattery, which sounds crazy when you're not talking
to how nine thousand, but it's something that we all
do every day. I mean, how how often have you
yelled at your computer and in a fit of rage

(30:54):
that it just won't load a page or something like that?
It is frequently as I yell at Josh Clark, so
you know too, three times a day? Um, and you know,
like like think about think about Clippy? Okay, people see right,
this was a program, This was a computer program. But

(31:15):
because it was anthropomorphized and and it acted without social graces,
people get annoyed by that. It's if if if Clippy
had not had eyes, would we have that reaction to Clippy.
I want to straighten clipp Let's let's also let's also
take a moment here to mention that we've got another
There's another podcast that that Lauren and I do called

(31:35):
Text Stuff, and we did a full episode on Microsoft
Bob which followed the same sort of design approach that
ultimately spawned Clippy. So if you've ever wondered what an
entire operating system would look like using the anthropomorphized Clippy approach,
it was, yeah, listen to our episode on Microsoft Bob,
because we had a lot to say about that. Okay, well,

(31:58):
here's a a question I want to ask about this
idea of more anthropomorphic technology in the home. If we've
got smarter things, we've got more autonomously moving things, and
we're giving these things names more often, is it going
to be harder to get rid of them? I imagine? So,
I apart from costs, I can I can imagine. I

(32:20):
can imagine. Let's all right, So, you know how if
you buy a a laptop computer. After a couple of years,
it may end up being the case where your laptop
is not performing, maybe the hard drived eyes and you
find out that that repairing your laptop would cost as much,
if not more, than buying a brand new laptop. Then
in that case, you might think, all right, I'm gonna

(32:41):
just try and retrieve as much information off this old
laptop as possible and just buy a new one. Now,
let's talk about let's look into the future where we
have more sort of robotic assistant type things, and we
have started this. This concept of naming, I think would
just continue to be on the rise. I think we
would see more and more people naming these sort of
robotic assistance whatever they might be, whether it's a vacuum

(33:05):
cleaner or something much more sophisticated. I can easily imagine
that if you have developed this kind of emotional attachment
to something, that even if you were to find out
that repairing it would be more expensive than buying a
new one, it would be a lot harder to just
kind of abandon this thing that you've developed this emotional
attachment to to get a brand new thing. It's almost

(33:25):
like saying, well, you know, my dog, he's no longer
a puppy. He doesn't run around and chase the ball
as much as he used to, so I'm just going
to get rid of him and get a puppy. This
one's broken, I'm going to get a new one. I mean,
I'm sure there are people out there who feel that way,
but I can't identify with that at all, because I've
got a sixteen year old dog that I still treat
like a puppy. And it's partially that concept of I mean,

(33:47):
you know, like once you give something like R two
d too a nickname, I mean you you don't call
him R two D two. You call him R two
and it's spelled A R E A R ticed. The
fans who love are two. It's it's a word. It's
not the it's not the letters yeah or um or
or Johnny number five from from Short Circuit, which is
I'm possibly a terrible example because that's a really ridiculous film.

(34:12):
But um but but you know, once, once he gave
himself a name Johnny, it was like, Nope, that's a
that's a dude. That's a thing right there. We can't
can't get at him well, and so we're humanizing other objects.
There's also this other concept in science fiction, the de
humanization by removing names. Oh that's that's what says in

(34:34):
my outline right here dys Topian Literature and Film excellent. Yes, yeah, well,
I mean that's a thing we just all realize is
going to happen, right when the future is taken over
by these like nightmarish I see techno Stalin's or like
I don't want you to have a personality, or or
just corporations. Yeah, they'll say, look, you are not Jonathan.

(34:55):
You're five K nine one or yes, or or or
you know something like in the video game hit Man
where the character has a barcode tattooed on the back
of his name. Is this ever really going to happen?

(35:16):
I think that. I think that calling Jonathan, I mean
just having to yell across the office like like five
K nine what four to uh you turn those notes
into me? I mean, that's that's a huge that's you
know what kind of reaction that would get, Well, it
would be a very rude one uh. Or As another example,
this is not just a science fiction thing, and this

(35:37):
is not a new concept. Uh. If you are familiar
with the the novel Lama, the character Jean Valjean is
given a number in prison two six oh one, which
becomes very important. That's how he's identified by the antagonist
javert he he doesn't call him by name. Most times
he calls him by that number. It's a dehumanization or

(35:59):
or an a very tragic example, um, the people who
were placed in the internment camps and in Nazi Germany
during the Holocaust, where we're given numbers that they were
referred to instead of names. Yeah, there are actually countries
today that regulate naming. Now it's certainly uh, not as
as awful as that, um, But for example, uh, in Iceland. Uh,

(36:21):
let's say you want to name your child, Well, you
can't name it just anything you want. In fact, there
are government guidelines and the government has to approve the
name you give your child. Just for example. There there's
some countries uh, and Iceland is one of them where
apparently the name of your child is supposed to reflect
the child's gender. Huh. Yeah, so uh, you're not supposed

(36:47):
to give a boy name to a girl, and you're
not supposed to give a girl name to a boy.
That seems kind of archaic. Yeah, I don't. I mean,
there's probably some kind of reasoning behind this, but it
may be something from the olden days. But it is
interesting because there are some names that have changed over
time where it was identified as either a masculine name

(37:10):
at one time and then changed to a feminine name
at another time, or or are women these days who
go by the names Sam or Chris or something that
was traditionally. If you think of a person whose first
name is Blair, what what sex do you think that
person is? I usually think female. Yeah, well, it turns
out in Iceland that's supposed to be a boy's name.

(37:31):
But there is a girl who was born fifteen years
ago um to a mother named bjork Id's daughter and
she this girl was named Blair, and so she's grown
up with the name Blair. But apparently she uh just
recently had to fight a court battle in Iceland to

(37:51):
get her name recognized by the state. Like on her
passport it just had this placeholder name that said girl
because the state would not risk accept Blair as a
girl's name. It's supposed to be a boy's name. Well,
finally that she won her court case and and got
her name recognized. There's a case of a German boy
being named Maddie and that was a name that was

(38:14):
turned to m A T. T I that was turned
down because the sex of the baby. Um was not
obvious from that name. That's wild. This is the twenty
one century. I guess that was the twentieth century, but
laid on in it. Yes, Um, so in in lots
of countries. Also, they're not just restrictions on, say, like
the gender alignment of a name, but there are restrictions

(38:38):
basically on on matters of taste, like baby's named Adolf
Hitler and Osama bin Laden have been outlawed in Germany.
Um well though, I mean, I guess then again, you
can see why you wouldn't want kids to have those names. Yeah,
but outlawing it seems a little bit extreme. I feel
like that's the kind of I mean, I don't know,

(38:58):
I feel like that's something the government doesn't necessarily need
to have a say in. Like if if those parents
can't culturally for themselves decide that that baby should not
be named that thing, then yeah, on one hand, you
could say, well, this is to protect the child who
has no choice in his or her name, and yet
we'll have to deal with the consequences of having that

(39:19):
name up until the point at which they can legally
change it themselves. So I mean it's yeah, I definitely.
I definitely can see both sides of it. I agree
more with you, Lauren then with with them, with the
government's approach in this case. But at the same time,
I can at least see some sense in it, just
just going like that's child abuse. Make it stop. Yeah,

(39:39):
kind I mean, I mean, and I don't know. It's strange,
Like I like having the name Lauren Um, which also
spelled differently, usually can can be a boy's name. I
have had a few people either send like junk male
kind of stuff or call me going like hey, Mr Vogelbaum,
and I'm like, nope, that's not a dude. Okay, let's
let's let's let's wrap this up, guys, let's talk a

(40:01):
little bit. Let's wrap this up, this discussion up with
a little talk about naming in the scientific world. Well, okay, yeah,
so you might say that there could be a scientific
approach to human beings in which a serial number would
be more efficient than having a name like Jonathan Strickland.
That's ridiculous. If you know from googling, Jonathan Strickland on
this podcast is not the only Jonathan Strickland. I'm sure

(40:22):
there are lots of there's a young African American pilot. Uh,
there are quite a few people in jail. Uh none
of them are me. Um, there's a representative I think
in Texas. I share a name with some kind of
person who's big in like the Ohio Health Department or
something like that. I don't know. I am, shockingly enough
the only Lauren Vogel bomb on this planet. From what

(40:45):
I can tell your special sniffla Vogel Bomb is is
a pretty pretty rare not that many bared trees anyway.
But so, but so for all of you who have
slightly more common names, yeah, yeah, you know, I can.
And this is why things like security numbers were were invented,
because it's a lot easier to have this nine digit

(41:05):
signifier than to go like Jonathan Strickland. Is that Jonathan
Strickland one through a hundred? Like like which one? There
was even another Jonathan Strickland in the college. I went
to who who's definitely complicated? Just one change, one difference
in our middle initials, and that was it. Uh. So
there are lots of other things than people. We might

(41:26):
want to apply the same kind of specificity to write
social security number concept. What about um species of organisms? Well,
I mean, really, when we get here, the naming isn't
so much a problem as is the taxonomy, which is
the idea of not just not just naming something, but

(41:46):
having figuring out where it fits within a larger context. Right.
But um, I mean before we even got to the
binomial nomenclature we used today. I mean, think about how
confusing biology must have been before we had specific, unique
names for every species. When it's like, the biology was
pretty much called let's cut this thing open and see
what the future is trying to study spiders, and it's like, well,

(42:09):
we have a brown spider and another brown spider, and
this is a black spider. And well, I think it
was also pretty confusing because people had such a low
grip on science in general compared to what we know today.
I'm sure that you know, Star trek Ara, people would
say the same thing about us. But but the biological classification,
I mean, the idea of classifying things so that you

(42:30):
can have a meaningful scientific discussion about them dates back
to the ancient Greeks. It's not something that's brand new. Well,
they did think that bees were related to like maggots
or something like that. At one point, there were there
were a lot of mistakes were made, and we corrected
them as time went on. So so generally speaking, if

(42:50):
you're going with the classical nomenclature approach, you're looking at
the seven main ranks in in biology Kingdom Islem class order, family, genus,
and species. And genus and species tend to be what
we refer what we use when we when we're talking
about a specific animal, we use the genus and the
species to identify that animal. Now, these these classifications were

(43:14):
based upon morphology is based upon the the appearance and
the apparent structure of these animals. So we grouped them
together based upon that. But that was before we had genetics,
wasn't it. Now we had genetics the whole time, we
just didn't study it very much. The the but no, no,
it was before we understood much about genetics. You're right,

(43:35):
and and so uh the so so this this classic
kind of morph morphological approach. You might have two critters
that on the surface appear very similar, but in fact
come from very different ancestors through convergent evolution or some
other means, and so you may not have them grouped

(43:55):
in the best way. If you want to talk about
groups of animals that are actually related to one another.
And that's what brings us to the phylogenetic nomenclature approach,
which is where you're trying to group animals based upon
that common ancestor. They're grouped into clades, is essentially what
they're called. And in this clade, you you're you're looking
at an ancestor that then created all these you know,

(44:17):
the descendants. Branches are all the different branches. Yeah, you're
looking at kind of like a tree, and you could
look at things like primates, and primates have lots of
different little little branches that branch off of that. You've
got Laura's Yeah, you've got monkeys, you've got apes, and
then apes are their own clade. That's a subclade within

(44:39):
the clade of primates, because apes include all the great
apes as well as you know, the manned and all
that kind of stuff. But if you were to say monkeys,
that's not a claydon to itself, because there are different
monkeys that have slightly different ancestors that are within the
primate clade, but they themselves, the monkeys do not have
their own distinct clade, you see. So because there you

(45:00):
can find monkeys in different parts of the world that
do not have a common ancestor until you get back
to that primate ancestor. So the idea. Yeah, it's it's
useful in the sense of you can you can classify
animals together in a way where you can have a
meaningful discussion about how they're related to one another or
not related to one another. But it doesn't necessarily mean

(45:22):
that we actually change the way we name things, because
it's more about the overall taxonomy as opposed to the
individual species name. Right. We're not going to stop calling
a dog a canine just right just because we find
out it came from a lobster or something. Okay, so
in that case perhaps, but they're just really cute lobsters

(45:45):
want a lobster. There are other things that we have
to talk about that we need, you know, specificity for
like in chemistry, for example, chemicals are very important that
we that were very specific. Obviously, if you're talking about
chemical reactions, you have to be sure you're talking about
the the exact chemicals involved, and if you happen to
be using some general terms, you may not have the

(46:07):
specific chemical you were thinking of, and the and the
mixture will turn out wrong or possibly exclusive. Well, there
are lots of familiar names for chemicals, but then there
are also technical names. So so you have a scientific
name that's basically a word that's put together by algorithm. Yeah,
the scientific name tends to reflect things like the chemical

(46:29):
process that happened in order of that chemical to exist.
It's got a lot of different references within the name itself,
which means that some of these names get pretty long. Yeah. Um,
And then you know today we've we've got the those
those long chemical names versus the um proprietary names that
people give to a drug, for example, it's going to

(46:50):
go out. Well, there's the example I was going to
give was the one that that Joe pulled up with
as the largest known protein, which is Titan t I
t I n named after Titan t I t A
n uh. It's scientific name, which was designated by the
International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry is um too
long for me to pronounce. I mean literally, it would

(47:11):
take three hours for me to pronounce it. I am
not kidding. It has nineteen letters in it. It's considered
the longest word in the English language if you count
it as a word, which not all people do. But yeah,
that's that's a long word. There's no spaces in it.
It's a word. If you're a lexicographer you might disagree,

(47:34):
but anyway, So that's that's another example of where specificity
is needed. And then there are the concept of naming stars.
Oh yeah, yeah, that's complicated as it turns out. I mean,
you know, okay, So so there's common names that we
all know stars by, perhaps um at least some stars.

(47:54):
A small sample of the stars that exist in the
very bright ones that are very obvious in your scular
region of the world might have a common name. But
Roximus centauri or something. Sure, well, well those those are
actually named by the Bayer designation, which comes from about
sixteen o three and is based on the brightness of
a star within its given constellation. And and this is
the Western concept of constellations, of course, I mean not

(48:18):
of course, but but that's where that's happened. That's what happened. Yeah,
So that's based on Greco Roman constellations, which is just
so incredibly earth based that I'm sitting here trying to
imagine future space travelers going like like where's the center
and the sky really, guys, are we still using this?
This is ridiculous. But then even the designation for stars

(48:38):
that we've we've discovered only through the use of powerful
telescopes still have an Earth based designation because we're giving
them coordinates, right sure, And you know, and all of
the other designations that are that are out there. I mean,
you know, we we've switched to a bunch of different
ones over the years, and you know, some use numbers
to designate brightness within a constellation. Some use um ascension

(49:01):
in the sky like right ascension instead of brightness, and
but it's all just it's all really just the same. Yeah,
I mean, obviously, if you lived on another planet, and
let's say that we're going to go ahead a few
thousand years and humans have colonized different areas of space,
then if you're referring to the old naming system of stars,

(49:22):
it may not be as meaningful to you, because what
was the brightest star in a constellation on Earth? And
let's say we've found some magical faster than light travel
where we can go really really far into the universe,
may not be the brightest star in that constant fact,
there might not be even a constellation from your perspective,
and you know, the way you look at it, you
don't see that same sort of shape. So you would
have to refer to the name either through an archaic

(49:45):
and largely meaningless system, or we'd have to come up
with a brand new way of naming stuff. It would
be like still using hours and minutes after we leave
the earth, or right, we might just have to do
it for convenience sake. But guys, guys, guys, guys, guess solution.
Because I saw this website, and on this website, for
fifty bucks, you can name a star. So that's how

(50:06):
we do it, right, We just pay the fifty bucks
and we just start naming stars. Problem solved, right, Jonathan,
As as we have talked about previously on the show,
maybe you were absent that day, even though you were
sitting here. Um, but you can you cannot. You cannot
give a star. I mean you can give a star name,
and that you can call up that company and have
them put a line in their database next to that

(50:26):
stars designation and say that that's the name that you
have given it. But star's official names are given by
the International Astronomical Union, and and you cannot call them
and give them fifty dollars and name a star. And
these other businesses you don't even know if they're really
putting a name next to a database, not that it
would matter if they did or didn't. They they're really

(50:47):
just printing you a certrificate, UM, which which you can
do yourself, and I recommend that you do that. If
you really want to name a star. I'm launching the
power point uh wizard right now. Or um, get yourself
a really good telescope and start looking for new stars.
Oh do you get to name a star if you
discover it? Um? There there are rules there. There are
really complicated rules. They I opened up a fact sheet

(51:10):
on it and I was just like, well, I'm not
going to understand this this afternoon, so I'm just going
to close this again. Um. But I don't have a
telescope powerful enough to detect anything that hasn't already been detected.
I think, Uh, there's always going to be a numerical designation,
and the I you recommends several different methods of giving
them that kind of designation. And there's usually also am

(51:33):
a letter designation that's going to talk about what galaxy
and or maybe what constellation it's in interesting well. Anyway,
the I think that kind of wraps up our whole
discussion here, the whole idea about names having power. Obviously,
there is something to it beyond just these these stories
that we've heard in folklore infairance. Psychologically it's important, yeah uh,

(51:54):
and you know, just practically it's important, obviously. I think
it's if we didn't have names, I wouldn't know what
to call these chuckle heads and across from me. So anyway,
we want to invite all of our listeners as always
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(52:15):
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