“Regular Joe” surnames

American:

Mr. Blow has been the frontrunner all along, ever since generic Joes first rose to prominence and began to compete with generic Johns (Doe, Q. Public). Joe Bloggs enjoyed his quarter-hour of fame in the nineties but ended up falling as quickly as he had risen. Shmoe has always been my Joe of choice, so I’m gratified to see him gaining steadily, playing tortoise to Bloggs’s hare. If current trends continue, he’s set to surpass Blow within the next 10 years or so.

British:

In Britain, on the other hand, Bloggs is unstoppable

Stereotypes according to Google

A few years ago I thought it would be interesting to type “why are ____ so” into Google (filling in the blank with various races, religions, nationalities, etc.) and see what suggestions the autocomplete function provided. I filed the results away and forgot about them, just finding them now as I was cleaning out some old folders.

You can’t replicate these results now. Google has apparently changed the autocomplete algorithm so it blocks such things, presumably because it makes Google look bad if they helpfully suggest that you might want to search for “why are Africans so ugly” or “why are Jews so cheap.” Since this information is no longer available to anyone who searches for it, I thought I’d share the results I got:

• black people: loud, athletic, funny, angry, cool, mean, good at sports, muscular, good at basketball, religious
• white people: fake, mean, rude, smart, attractive, rich, good looking, lame, skinny, annoying
• Asians: smart, rude, thin, short, good at math, cheap, annoying, quiet, rich, perfect
• Hispanics: rude, short, loud, religious, lazy, family oriented, fertile, proud, smart, annoying
• men: lazy, mean, shallow, insecure, controlling, visual, immature, moody, annoying, complicated
• women: emotional, crazy, difficult, mean, beautiful, confusing, needy, shallow, selfish, irrational
• gays: gay, obnoxious, sensitive, in your face, powerful, feminine, hated, rich, angry
• Christians: weird, arrogant, happy, nice, fake, annoying, narrow minded, angry, rude
• atheists: hateful, mean, rude, arrogant, intolerant, smug, annoying, mean to christians, hated in america, aggressive
• Muslims: angry, strict, sexist, sensitive, intolerant, radical, barbaric, cruel, nice, touchy
• Mormons: pretty, successful, wealthy, awesome, fake, conservative, pushy, boring, annoying, arrogant
• Buddhists: happy, selfish, peaceful, annoying, nice
• Protestants: arrogant, stupid, anti catholic, annoying, ignorant, mean, conservative, bitter, dumb, judgemental
• Catholics: mean, arrogant, strict, liberal, judgemental, annoying, rich, nice, interested in mary, conservative
• Jews: cheap, smart, rich, powerful, intelligent, rude, funny, arrogant, persecuted, liberal
• Republicans: stupid, evil, angry, mean, hateful, greedy, crazy, selfish, religious, paranoid
• Democrats: stupid, angry, racist, dumb, ignorant, lazy, evil, awesome, ugly, blind
• liberals: stupid, smug, arrogant, angry, mean, annoying, hateful, racist, naive, ugly
• conservatives: stupid, hateful, angry, racist, crazy, afraid of obama, paranoid, ignorant, close minded, afraid
• old people: mean, grumpy, racist, stubborn, cute, slow, angry, boring, dumb, cold
• young people: stupid, lazy, rude, tall, selfish, depressed, mean, liberal, violent, shallow
• Americans: stupid, rude, loud, ignorant, religious, tall, patriotic, lazy, paranoid, weird
• Indians: smart, arrogant, annoying, skinny, short, creepy, good at math, corrupt, successful, loud
• English people: arrogant, cold, mean, stuck up, funny, boring, skinny, tall, smart, reserved
• French people: rude, mean, thin, attractive, gay, dark, short, annoying, hot, healthy
• Africans: ugly, tall, strong, violent, fast, loud, stupid, dark, rude, good at running
• British people: pale, smart, cool, cold, tan, skinny, polite, rude, lazy, sarcastic
• Chinese people: rude, loud, smart, weird, short, heartless, cheap, rich, small, annoying
• Russians: rude, strong, badass, good at chess, angry, rich, tall, weird, crazy, cold

I had planned to do similar searches for several other nationalities, but I didn’t get around to it — and now, as I’ve said, it is everlastingly too late.

Most of the results are no surprise, but I thought some of them were pretty funny. I love how the first result for “why are gays so…” is “…gay.” Also, notice how the British are apparently pale, tan, polite, and rude. (But perhaps some of those suggestions are sarcastic?) Above all, it is most heartening to see how much the Right and the Left have in common.

It really makes you wonder why politicians choose to focus so much on divisive issues instead of on the many important things that unite us.

Waking precognition experiments: postmortem

I’ve now completed five experiments in waking precognition. In each experiment I tried to foresee the contents of a randomly selected book before reading it, and for each book I came up with 10 potentially precognitive images. The five books I used were:

• The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi. Translated by Frederick Townsend.
• The Letters of Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton. Vol. II.
• Edward Stewart White. The Westerners.
• Laura Lee Hope. The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms.
• Max Pemberton. The Man Who Drove the Car.

The table below shows the results for each of these 50 images. The number 0 indicates a miss; 1 indicates a weak similarity to something in the book or in my life during the book-reading period; 2 indicates a moderate similarity; 3 would have been used to indicate a perfect hit if there had been any. One of the images is marked N/A because it was fulfilled by my seeing something which I had seen many times before and can therefore not be considered specifically precognitive.

 

	Leo.	Nel.	White	Hope	Pem.
1.	0	0	1	0	0
2.	1	0	0	0	0
3.	0	1	0	0	0
4.	2	0	0	0	0
5.	0	0	0	0	0
6.	N/A	0	2	0	0
7.	2	0	0	0	0
8.	0	0	0	0	0
9.	0	0	0	1	0
10.	0	0	0	0	0

 

So 84% of the images are complete misses, without even the slightest resemblance to anything in the books; and there is not a single instance of clear and unambiguous precognition. As for the smattering of ones and twos, it’s impossible to evaluate them in any statistically rigorous manner, since there is no control group and no way of determining how many such results ought to be expected to occur by chance under the null hypothesis that there is no such thing as precognition. However, my common-sense interpretation is that I have not demonstrated any precognitive abilities and that I have failed to replicate Dunne’s results.

I will not be doing any more of these book experiments, since my results thus far give me no reason to expect anything interesting to result from them.

German dominance at the very highest levels of accomplishment

A discussion between Bruce Charlton and commenter Dearieme here brought up the question of whether or not France, given its long cultural dominance and large population, was underrepresented among the ranks of civilization-making geniuses.

At first I supported Bruce in saying that France was roughly equal to Britain and Germany. In Charles Murray’s book Human Accomplishment, he identifies a total of 4,0002 significant figures in the arts and sciences, and roughly equal numbers of them from the period 1400-1950 come from those three regions. (Italy is a respectable runner-up, but no other region even comes close.)

Upon further consideration, though, it still seemed that there was a qualitative difference between the great Germans and Englishmen on the one hand and the great Frenchmen on the other. As great as Lavoisier and Descartes were, they and their compatriots still seemed to be a notch below the likes of Newton, Shakespeare, Einstein, and Beethoven. So I went back to Human Accomplishment and looked only at the best of the best — the top 72 of the 4,002 greats identified by Murray, those who scored at least 50 on a scale where Shakespeare is 100 and Richard Wright is 1.

Here’s how the nationalities of those 72 super-greats break down:

At this level of accomplishment, Germany is clearly in a class of its own, with both France and England lagging behind.

If we lump together countries which are culturally and historically akin, the chart looks like this:

The Germans still dominate, and would do so to an even greater degree if the Netherlands (usually considered part of Großdeutschland despite the language difference) were included, but the Anglosphere is now close behind it — and, yes, the French do seem to lag a bit. The real underachiever, though, is Spain — historically one of the most powerful countries in Europe, on par with England and France, but with only a single dubious name to contribute to the ranks of the super-great.

Here are the names of the people represented on the charts above:

• Greater Germany
  • Germany: Beethoven, Einstein, Mozart, Kepler, Koch, Herschel, Bach, Gauss, Goethe, Wagner, Kant, Leibniz, Paul Ehrlich, Dürer
  • Switzerland: Euler, Paracelsus (both German Swiss)
  • Poland: Copernicus (German Polish)
  • Austria: Haydn
• The Anglosphere
  • England: Newton, Darwin, Shakespeare, Faraday, Cavendish, Halley, William Smith, Harvey, J. J. Thomson
  • Scotland: Lyell, Watt, James Hutton, Maxwell
  • USA: Edison, Thomas Hunt Morgan
  • New Zealand: Rutherford
• Italy: Galileo, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Dante, Titian, Virgil (Roman), Giotto, Bernini, Cassini (Italian French), Marconi
• France: Descartes, Lavoisier, Pasteur, Lamarck, Cuvier, Laplace, Fermat, Cezanne
• Greece: Aristotle, Hippocrates, Plato, Euclid, Galen, Ptolemy (Greek Egyptian), Homer, Archimedes
• Scandinavia
  • Sweden: Berzelius, Linnaeus, Carl Scheele
  • Denmark: Tycho, Bohr
• Netherlands: Rembrandt, Huygens
• Spain: Picasso

Many of the specific fields of art and science catalogued by Murray are dominated by a particular nationality. Below I list all the fields in which a single nationality accounts for at least 50% of the super-greats.

• Music: 5/5 (100%) are German (including one Austrian).
• Physics: 6/9 (67%) are from the Anglosphere; 4/9 (44%) are from England proper.
• Chemistry: 2/3 (67%) are Swedish.
• Art: 6/10 (60%) are Italian.
• Mathematics: 4/8 (50%) are German (including one German Swiss).
• Earth sciences: 2/4 (50%) are Scottish.
• Philosophy: 2/4 (50%) are Greek.

Epistemological fashions

From Google Ngram Viewer.

Smoking and creativity: 20th-century data

Collecting data on the smoking habits of 18th-century writers wasn’t working out so well. After going through the 20 most eminent writers on my list but only being able to find anything for about half of them (and realizing that this track record could only get worse as I moved on to the more obscure authors), I decided I needed to find a more cooperative sample.

Figuring that there would be more biographical information available for more recent figures, and that English-speaking writers would have more biographies in English, I looked at male writers from English-speaking countries (Britain, Ireland, and America) who turned 40 (or died, for those who didn’t make it to 40) between 1900 and 1950. As before, the list of significant writers comes from Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment.

This time I was much more successful. My list includes 59 men, and I was able to find some kind of information for all but 6 of them. You can see the spreadsheet here.

I had hoped to analyze the data to see if higher levels of literary accomplishment were associated with higher rates of smoking. But unfortunately the early 20th century, unlike the 18th, seems to have been a time when just about everyone smoked. My sample includes a grand total of three, count them, three unambiguous non-smokers (Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, and Robert Frost), plus three more (Eugene O’Neill, Graham Greene, and William Carlos Williams) who smoked but later quit. For whatever it’s worth, all three of the non-smokers are relatively eminent (scoring 15, 10, and 6, respectively, on a list where the median score is 4), but it’s hard to draw any real conclusions from such small numbers.

Another problem is that, though some are more eminent than others, everyone in my sample is an eminent writer. If I want to compare highly creative people to those who are less creative (rather than comparing the super-super-creative to the merely super-creative), I need a control group of people from the same period who did not work in a creative field. Of course, they must still be famous enough to have left behind adequate biographical information, which rather limits the choices. Athletes are out, for obvious reasons. Politicians are a possibility, but they may well have below-average rates of smoking for image-related reasons. (Certainly this is true today; I’m not sure whether it would have been true in the early 20th century.) Captains of industry could work, I suppose, if I could find a list somewhere, and if a sufficient number of them have gone down in history. I don’t have any other ideas.

Tobacco use among 18th-century writers

As a follow-up to my post on smoking and creativity, I’ve compiled a list of all the significant 18th-century figures in Western literature (as listed by Charles Murray in Human Accomplishment) and am in the process of gathering information on who smoked and who didn’t.

In contrast to my previous post, I am here restricting myself to a limited time period (the 18th century)  and am considering relatively minor literary figures as well as major ones — from Goethe and Rousseau all the way down to George Farquhar and Maler Müller. The idea is to compare the major figures with the minor ones to see if tobacco use is associated with higher (or lower) levels of literary accomplishment.

I have put my data (what I have so far) on a spreadsheet here, which anyone can read and edit. So take a look, and if you happen to know anything about any of these people’s smoking habits or lack thereof, just add it to the spreadsheet. After I’ve collected enough data, I’ll put up another post analyzing it.

Smoking and creativity: a few data points

Bruce Charlton recently posted on a possible link between smoking and creative accomplishment. In the comments, Dennis Mangan said that nicotine seemed especially helpful for writers and even asked, “Has there ever been a great writer who wasn’t a smoker?” Out of curiosity, I decided to check.

I took out Charles Murray’s Human Accomplishment, looked at the highest-ranking writers in his roster of significant figures in Western literature — those with a score of at least 25 on a scale from 1 (Joyce Cary, DuBose Heyward, and others of like stature) to 100 (Shakespeare) — and tried to find out who smoked and who didn’t. I had originally planned to check a larger number of writers, but sleuthing out the smoking habits of historical figures quickly becomes tedious. For whatever it’s worth, here’s what I found. If you have additional information about the smoking habits of any of these people, please leave a comment.

Smokers

• Molière: “No matter what Aristotle and the Philosophers say, nothing is equal to tobacco; it’s the passion of the well-bred, and he who lives without tobacco lives a life not worth living.”
• Lord Byron: “Sublime tobacco! which from east to west / Cheers the tar’s labor or the Turkman’s rest. / Divine in hookas, glorious in a pipe / When tipp’d with amber, mellow, rich, and ripe; / Like other charmers, wooing the caress / More dazzlingly when daring in full dress; / Yet thy true lovers more admire by far / Thy naked beauties—give me a cigar!”
• Dostoevsky: a heavy smoker, rolled his own cigarettes
• Schiller
• Sir Walter Scott
• T. S. Eliot: died of emphysema reportedly brought on by his heavy smoking
• Milton: smoked a pipe every night before going to bed
• Baudelaire
• Pushkin: an occasional social smoker
• Dickens
• Keats

Smokers who quit

• Tolstoy
• Émile Zola: “Perfection is such a nuisance that I often regret having cured myself of using tobacco.”

Non-smokers by choice

These people lived at a time when tobacco was available but did not use it.

• Goethe: “Only a few things I find as repugnant as snakes and poison. These four: tobacco smoke, bedbugs and garlic and [cross].”
• Rousseau
• Voltaire
• Victor Hugo: hated smoking, refused to allow anyone to smoke around him

Non-smokers of necessity

These people lived and died before tobacco had been introduced into the Old World.

• Dante
• Virgil
• Homer
• Petrarch
• Boccaccio
• Euripides
• Horace
• Cicero
• Ovid
• Aeschylus
• Sophocles

Unknown

I’ve been unable to find any definite information on these people’s smoking habits.

• Shakespeare: never mentions tobacco in his writing, but that doesn’t prove anything
• Jean Racine
• Ibsen
• Balzac
• James Joyce
• Cervantes
• Gogol
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Rilke: a biography mentions that he at first considered tobacco smoke “vile” but later got used to the smell; implies that he was a non-smoker, though I suppose he may have taken up the habit later
• Percy Bysshe Shelley

Trends in Mormon scripture citations 2: Who cites what

I’ve been playing with BYU’s LDS Scripture Citation Index again. This time, instead of looking at general trends over time, I focused on the citation habits of individual church leaders — all Apostles and First Presidency members who have at least 300 citations in the database, 48 individuals in all. (Heber J. Grant is excluded, as are all Apostles junior to Henry B. Eyring.)

In the social network diagram below, gray ellipses represent church leaders (labeled with their initials; GaS is George A. Smith, GAS is George Albert Smith, and jfs is Joseph Fielding Smith). The darker the shade of gray, the more recently the person was ordained an Apostle. Colored rectangles represent books of scripture. A link between a leader and a book means that the leader’s number of citations from that book (measured as a percentage of his total citations) is at least one standard deviation above the average for the 48 leaders in the database. Six of the 48 leaders analyzed — including current church president Thomas S. Monson and the late James E. Faust, recently of the First Presidency — don’t show up on the diagram at all because their quoting habits are so utterly unexceptional. (The other four are Heber C. Kimball, Franklin D. Richards, George Q. Cannon, and Joseph F. Smith.)

The links do not necessarily indicate which books a given leader cites the most often. For example, Brigham Young quoted from the New Testament twice as much as from the Old (46% and 23%, respectively) — but when you compare those figures to the average rates of citation (40% for the New Testament, 15% for the Old), he stands out as an Old Testament man.

The diagram illustrates very clearly the recent rise of the Book of Mormon, pioneered by Ezra Taft Benson and followed by every apostle ordained under his leadership.

Trends in Mormon scripture citations

Someone recently referred me to Brigham Young University’s online LDS Scripture Citation Index, a database of scripture citations from General Conference (an event, held twice a year, in which the top leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints give speeches addressed to the general membership), and, just as I usually do when presented with a lot of data on a topic that interests me, I proceeded to waste far too much of my rather limited free time crunching numbers and looking for interesting patterns.

The Mormon scriptural canon consists of the Old and New Testaments, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants (a collection of Joseph Smith’s “revelations”), and a slim volume of miscellanea called the Pearl of Great Price. The graph below shows how many times each book of scripture was cited each year from 1942 to 2009. (The figures for 1957 have been doubled because only one conference was held that year instead of the usual two.)

As you can see, the Book of Mormon, which had previously been languishing in Pearl-of-Great-Price-like obscurity, suddenly shot to the top in 1985, since which time it has been cited about as frequently as the New Testament (formerly the undisputed top dog) and Doctrine and Covenants. What happened in 1985? Ezra Taft Benson.

It’s also interesting to look at the changing fortunes of some individual verses. The tables below show the number of citations per decade for eleven especially prominent passages. These eleven were chosen because each of them has had at least one decade in which it was cited 30 times or more.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Matthew 11:28 has been steadily rising in popularity and is the only Bible verse to have reached the 30-citation mark in the post-Benson era.

And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.

Matthew 22:39 and John 17:3 both peaked in the sixties and have been declining — but not dramatically — since.

Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.

Acts 4:12, which also peaked in the sixties, is clearly on the way out.

Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life.

For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.

Yea, and are willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort, and to stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places that ye may be in, even until death, that ye may be redeemed of God, and be numbered with those of the first resurrection, that ye may have eternal life—

These three verses from the Book of Mormon — 2 Nephi 31:20, Mosiah 3:19, and Mosiah 18:9 — all leapt to prominence in the Benson era and have been popular ever since.

And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost.

Moroni 10:4 is the only Book of Mormon verse to have reached the 30-citation mark before Ezra Taft Benson. It actually dropped in popularity during his tenure, though it seems to be making a comeback.

Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God.

If scriptures were stocks, this would be the one to invest in. It’s gone from zero to 36 and shows no signs of slowing down. I’m not sure what exactly that says about the Mormon zeitgeist, since it seems like a pretty nondescript verse to me.

For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.

It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound. When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!

Although the Pearl of Great Price is consistently Mormonism’s least-cited book of scripture, the two heavyweight champion verses — Moses 1:39 and Joseph Smith History 1:17 — both come from it. Moses 1:39 is the only verse to have been cited at least 30 times in every one of the six decades.