I won’t tag him, but as assigned by vgr:
1 like= 1 opinion of mine about “naming practices”.
Conversation
Names, while far from *fully* arbitrary, are the most arbitrary, information that we keep routinely track of.
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2. I don’t claim to have good taste in names.
I usually want to choose clever names, but I think that’s usually the wrong approach.
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3. I think the right criterion for names is more like how *inhabitable* the name is. A name shouldn’t have too much personality on its own.
Like how people say “that dress is wearing you”, and that’s a bad thing.
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4. There’s something up with people in my subculture and rejecting our names. I know so many people who chose their first or last names as adults. (Not talking about trans people.)
Feels like rootlessness trauma? Or like nerds refuse to memorize equations? Are they the same?
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5. I relate to this passage. To this day I get a funny sort of thrill—not entirely positive—when I hear my name or see it written.
My name does sort of allow me-the-algorithm to be in two places at once. This is powerful.
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6. I won’t like the Orson Scott Card essay I’m stealing this idea from, but something science fiction tends to get wrong is that fancy new things often have the same names as their ancestor.
Smart phones are still called phones.
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Partly to keep the arbitrariness at bay, naming conventions are good. My dad and 3 of of siblings all have light-themed names and it’s cool. For some reason the younger doesn’t, and IMO that’s too bad.
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7. I think products, or really anything commercial, should all be uniquely googleable. I’m not sure whether it’s good or bad in the median case for people to be though.
Since my first name is misspelled, I’m easy to google and that’s been fine for me.
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