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mk · 3627 days ago · link · · parent · post: The Jennifer epidemic: How the spiking popularity of different baby names cycle like genetic drift.
If that’s the case, did my mother find a perfect name that just happened to coincide with a million other babies? Or did she merely have the illusion of choice? One doesn't imply the other. Even chaotic processes have boundaries. Just because a process can be described in general does not mean that the behavior of an individual component is non-random.The math behind this presents a troubling conclusion: that the popularity of any given baby name — just like any given pop song — is merely a mix of linguistically and culturally appropriate sounds, familiarity and mathematical processes.