Middle name initials enhance evaluations of intellectual performance (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Middle name initials enhance evaluations of intellectual performance (2014)

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

179 pointsdmichulke92 comments

My grandfather, born with no middle name, was urged by his colleagues to fabricate one because he needed a middle initial for appearance's sake in his field. Everyone used their middle initial in communications. And besides, you couldn't have a monogram without three initials.

His first name was Alexander, and being a modest man, he settled on a middle initial of "G," which he joked stood for "the Great." Apparently it worked for him. I'm not sure if it was a legal name change but he used it for the rest of his life.

In the US, generally speaking, you are free to just start using a new name. I did the opposite, dropping my middle name wherever possible and it has only come up once. I even got my current passport issued without my middle name by accident. (I forgot to put my middle name on the application and it was never questioned.)

My mother has gone by her middle name for her entire life, with almost everything she signs up for completely omitting that her first name even exists.

I kept expecting it to cause her problems, but it doesn't seem to have. Of course, dealing with the government means she has to use her first name sometimes, but that's it.

You can use any name you want.

Anyone who knows me calls me by a nickname that isn't documented anywhere, for reasons too long and too boring to go into. It's worked out for me, as generally speaking, if someone calls looking for someone with my legal given name, it isn't someone whom I want to talk to!

Both of my kids are called by a nickname derived from their middle names! Awesome way to distinguish fake association attacks.

I've been asked about why my boarding pass didn't have the same name as my passport once, back when I didn't put a middle name. I'm from France where we traditionally have 3 first names: <actual first name> <godmother|father's first name> <grandmother|father's first name> (at least that's how I was named). For paperwork purposes in the US I had to make up a middle name so I use my second and third names. Say Albert Bernard Charles Dupont would be: "Albert" "Bernard Charles" "Dupont". This way it's also consistent with my passport.

I also don't put my name's accent in most computer systems in the US (é). I have it on Linkedin though, and it trips a surprising amount of automated recruiting emails.

Same story here, I've stopped using both the accents on my name and my middle name years ago, and gotten used to that now. Been thinking about changing my name to officially not include the accents anymore, I don't even like them anymore.

Like many other letters and accents, it may in the end be simplified and lost in time, like the thorn and long s.

> I'm from France where we traditionally have 3 first names: <actual first name> <godmother|father's first name> <grandmother|father's first name> (at least that's how I was named).

as a french... euh quoi ?

Having multiple middle names is common in France. It doesn't mean that all French do it, though.

Yes, that last sentence threw me, as using a name for the rest of your life is a good indicator that it was recognized :D

I changed my last name to my very different middle name, leaving me with no middle name (and thus no initial, alas!). People who have not changed their names overestimate how much anyone cares. For instance, some credit card companies allow you to change your name online. Then they help to perpetuate the change by reporting it to the credit agencies.

My mom ended up using her maiden name, as the health system she worked for couldn't accommodate a person with no middle name.

In Ireland, it used to be common to not have a middle name (although people were referred to by undocumented names, at least in my family). A few relatives who immigrated and were in the military or merchant marine were designated with a middle name of "NMI" because they had no middle initial.

I just leave this here in the hope another programmer will pick it up.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Hah... your grandfather nailed my name and nickname.

When I read the names of the authors - "Wijnand A. P. van Tilburg Eric R. Igou" - I was immediately impressed.

Although they should have asked for input from an author with a hyphenated surname.

People who criticize the study because it's based on students in one university don't understand that the study is also a meta level demonstration of the effect. They passed the peer review.

I'm in awe.

Other study from them:

Igou, E. R., & Van Tilburg, W. A. P. (2015). Ahead of others in the authorship order: Names with middle initials appear earlier in author lists of academic articles in psychology. Frontiers in Psychology, 6. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00469

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0046...

There's a simple confounding reason for this. The earlier authors are in the author list, the more likely they are to be actively contributing. If there's a sparse contributor who doesn't respond, who has many papers already, or who is not actively involved in the final read-throughs, they will likely be somewhere in the middle of the author list and may miss that their middle initial is not correct. In contrast, if you are a first author, you will make damned sure your exact precise name is there, as your impact factor and future success hinges on the total number of papers you have.

“Wijnand A. P. van Tilburg” is a name that almost comes with a prefab backstory. Heir to a mysterious but large fortune, Danish royalty on his father’s side with minor French nobility on his mother’s, great-great-grandson of the most decorated officer of the Crimean War, one-half owner of a castle in Lichtenstein rumored to house up to three Vermeers unknown to the outside world, and of course the grisly fratricide in the family’s history which was the talk of society at the time but has now been papered over by the family’s philanthropic efforts in arts education in the wake of the tragedy.

You should be a writer.

I am working on my first novel.

The ultimate smartguy does first initial, middle name, especially when the middle name is obscure. You also avoid sounding like a serial killer in the wrong context.

J. Ulyssses Smith is obviously much smarter than a run of the mill John Smith. John U. Smith sounds like a guy who is “quiet and keeps to himself”.

J. Ulyssses Smith doesn’t “look” quite as smart as J. Ulysses Smith however...

Nice catch! Then again, spelling names wrong is trendy!

Unless your middle name is "Lee", in which case stick with First Last because you're gonna sound like a "quiet guy who keeps to himself" any other way.

Standout claim from the paper:

> Moreover, people with initials carrying a positive meaning (e.g., H. U. G.) live longer compared with those with initials carrying a negative meaning (e.g., M. A. D.; Christenfeld, Phillips, & Glynn, 1999).

(Emphasis the authors)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10576473

My initials are N.A., where does that leave me?

Doesn't matter.

Not applicable.

South of the Canadian border

in the gaming community, the NA zone is pretty cancer

So are the gaming community's memes, especially outside the gaming community.

Mine is NMN. I sometimes put these letters (No Middle Name) into form fields for the middle name even though I have a sufficient number of given names to fill in - just no ”middle name”.

That being said, I once heard that the prestige of multiple given names changed several times in Europe. There were times where multiple names were fashionable and times were a single given name was preferred.

How about people with non-breaking spaces in their name, how do they fare in life?

Tech support: "Was that John Doe?"

JD: "No, I said John Doe!"

Irish surnames with apostrophes are beloved by databases everywhere.

Here in Uruguay there are countless examples of immigrants that had to change their first or last name due to them being hard to write for immigration officials.

My grandparent went from Hermann to "German". We surprisingly kept the last name intact (most were botched on the translation to Spanish).

> Irish surnames with apostrophes are beloved by databases everywhere.

One of my co-devs changed his name on the internal system like that, just so he'd break anything he was working on before a client did.

They should add "in tests conducted exclusively on university students" in there.

so like Wile E. Coyote, Genius?

Also can't ignore that this is on a domain wiley.com hahaha

It has me wondering immediately about specific possiblecounter examples. Would it have that "prestige" effect for more unusual names like say Moon U. Zappa. Obviously fake or unfortunate names probably wouldn't benefit like Isaac P. Daily.

Does it increase with more middle names? Like Charles P. A. George?

The five studies they base their conclusions on were conducted on students at the University of Limerick, the University of Limerick, the University of Limerick, the University of Limerick and the University of Limerick.

We conclude that middle name initials are a big deal around the University of Limerick campus.

So, a slightly narrower scope than the usual psychology study.

This actually seems more comprehensive than most. They tested multiple times!

There is a pretty decent episode of Freakonomics Radio around how reproducible (or not) many psychological studies are. I know this is an issue for most studies, but Psychology seems to be in a league of their own with the "reproduction rate".

> how reproducible (or not) many psychological studies are.

Combine small effect size with a complete lack of understanding of statistics and you can be fairly sure that most psychological studies' conclusions are borderline junk level.

Combine that with the usual publication bias and you can be sure that more than 50% of the studies are wrong.

https://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-...

It has little to do with statistical understanding.

All psych students are required to study stats, and review the study design before starting.

It has everything to with a more systemic problem - publish or perish.

Students and professors alike are basically forced to run new studies. Conducting psych studies takes a lot of money and time because you're dealing with people. And that money and time isn't always available - so your standards drop a lot so you can just graduate or keep researching.

This.

And so far my experience is that most (but definitely not all) psych student are usually choosing psych over STEM due to their repulsion of math, physics and 'anything number'.

They see stats as an 'unfortunate exam they need to get through to pass' so they aim for a barley passing grade in order to focus on other areas they are more interested in. When they are pressured into publishing something the stats part is once again seen as "the impossibly complex part they need help with to be able to publish their interesting findings".

They have guidelines such as "p must be <= 0.05" so they try to mess with the data until they reach that point. Usually, most of the paper (including the conclusion) is already written so stats are considered to be the last administrative bruden to get trough to be able to publish.

they already have their conclusion before doing the maths?

I think this is an unfair stereotype. Psychology is really hard, the system you are studying is many times more complex than many other fields. I am going to have to ask for the source on that last paragraph too, that’s basically slandering the whole field as not doing actual science.

> Psychology is really hard, the system you are studying is many times more complex than many other fields.

If that's true though, then the mathematical rigor that should be demanded from its students must be higher than in other fields in order to achieve the same level of reliability. I doubt that is the case today.

The gp is basically saying psychologists can’t get the math right because most don’t like math and are just playing house to get publications. I am saying many do appreciate good statistics and go to bed worrying about it at night, and the lack of general reproducibility has more to do with the complexity of the field.

In most cases you have to find and convince a statistically representative sample to participate, and that’s so expensive and hard enough to often not be done completely, without having to consider that a statistically representative sample of individuals for many psychological phenomena is an impossible task.

To be fair P hacking is rampant across Academia and certainly not only in Psychology.

At that point you're just teaching them how to game the system better. It's a lot like anti-money laundering training. You know which people in your company shouldn't be taking it because it will just give them ideas.

> so your standards drop a lot so you can just graduate or keep researching.

So what is the point of publishing if you are fully aware you are pushing unreliable results out there? It won't do any good to your reputation as a future professional.

at least you're still employed, so hopefully you can publish something better next time.

The problem is made worse by the fact that no journal wants to publish studies where it was shown that some factor probably _doesn't_ matter.

The point is to secure more funding to run better and more complicated studies. If you wait around to publish the perfect study, you'll never get started.

The other part is that there are numerous psych and soc courses where students are required to participate in studies for part of their grades, which actively creates stupid biases, which kind of teaches that that kind of selection is acceptable

At least they ran multiple trials that all have the same problem, instead of just one?

More seriously, the results correlating happiness and success with alphabetical order of your name have all failed to replicate. I'm going to make a prediction now that I expect this will also fail replication if anyone ever bothers.

If more than half their sample wasn't just psych students they'd be coming out on top!

There once was a man from Nantucket, he had a brain so big he could pop it...

That's a perfect study to bring in response to typical comments quoting Richard Feynman's complaints that psychologists rarely replicate studies exactly.

yes, because most university attendees are primarily acculturated at their place of study, especially in regards to these things.

That's great, now I need a middle name. Any good suggestions?

Just take an initial letter, as in Rembrandt Q Einstein, or Homer J Simpson.

I use my middle initial (see my username) because there are plenty of Andrew Martins in these circles.

Be honest: you're just hunting for a little more Irish cred.

For more Irish cred, one can of course include an apostrophe as well as the other means mentioned elsewhere in this discussion. Verilog is quite useful in this regard, because of the way that one writes hexadecimal constants.

John 003'hdeadface Smith. Known as "six" to his friends.

> or Homer J Simpson

BTW relevant episode is called "Homer to the Max".

Or Harry S Truman [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman#Early_life_and...

Use a number, maybe something in hex.

So a middle initial A through F but you pronounce it as a number?

No, keep the leading 0x. John 0xdeadface Smith has the added social advantage of also enabling the 0pointer-is-superuser security hole in older versions of systemd, if one can convince people that one never goes by "John". (-:

Control-G. You'll really get attention when your name makes the bell ring on the VT-100 emulator.

') DROP TABLE Employees;--

Shouldn't it be

"); DROP TABLE Employees;--

But that would be SQL injection! Unlike the parent. Barbaric.

Nope. SQL uses single quotes for delimiting values, not double quotes.

sudo rm -rf * compound initials that will really make you stand out.

I don't have one and just pick random letters or names when it doesn't matter. Then I know which ones sold the info to the marketers. "Oh the place I have the X name to is now spamming me with junk mail..."

> Any good suggestions?

"Conqueror of worlds". Robert Conqueror of Worlds Smith sound like you know what you're doing when handling a nuke.

"Bloodfist"

Ah, going the Mongolian route. In actuality, Mongolian names often translate to completely badass things.

Take for example Sükhbaatar. Translation? “Axe hero”

You could do worse than a Mongol name for yourself.

Danger. Then you can tell people Danger is your middle name.

I actually seriously considered changing my middle name to Danger last year. However, I decided it wasn't worth the trouble for a cliche pickup line due to me being a dual citizen, and a resident in another, so I'd have to change my middle name in 3 different countries.

Plus, since it's the letter D, you get instant street cred for any One Piece fans. If that's your thing.

So is it JUST the initials? Or would the actual middle name serve the same effect I wonder.

I'm half joking half serious with this: that might subconsciously cause people to associate you with serial killers. For whatever reason, serial killers are frequently referred to by their complete name.

I commonly use my middle initial, not to be pretentious, but because there are so many people who have the same first and last name as me. I expect within a smaller pool of names (a culturally distinct region), or in the global space, that's why most people use them.

Authors: Wijnand A. P. van Tilburg & Eric R. Igou

Good thing I have a first name, a middle name and two surnames. That makes me a prodigy.

That depends on how you contract your name in research papers.

About a year ago, I read this and added my initial to linkedin. You won't believe what happened next.

Middle names (and initials) are ubiquitous in North America. Not so in the British Isles, OZ and NZ.

Alfred E. Newman, my hero!

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