Scott Adams thinks he can read your mind:

Let’s try a little experiment. I want you to think of one successful person. It can be anyone, famous or family member. Make sure you have just the one successful person in mind. Now concentrate on the first letter of that person’s last name.

Good. I’ll do the rest.

I will now wrinkle my brow and focus all my powers of ESP, trying to discern whether the letter in your mind is in the first half of the alphabet or the second half. Excuse me while I chant…ooom…oooom…okay.

Your letter is in the first half of the alphabet.

How’d I do? Leave a comment with the last name of the person you had in mind.

Seems like a cool trick - my random guess was in the first half. Ben Casnocha notes it jibes with his own name. Except as cool as this seems, I’m not convinced. Names aren’t distributed evenly across all 26 letters. I took some handy-dandy census data with the most common last names, loaded up the 20% that account for abut 75% of the people in the country, and checked out how they broke out by first letter. The first half of the alphabet - what Adams is looking for - accounts for 65% of the names in the list. In other words, it’s not evenly distributed. And the psychological affect of the trick is greater because the first three letters in the alphabet (11.5% of letters) account for the names of about 20% of the people in the list.

Want to check out more? The graph below plots the cumulative percent of those in the list against and what it would look like if letters were evenly distributed. Or you can take a peek at the data yourself and run some even better tests.

Categories: Ephemera