Monday, December 10, 2007

Steven Pinker vs. Whatshisname Update

Some of you may have already noticed that the poll on "Who is more famous: Steven ('Mega famous Author of The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works') Pinker or Edwin [sic] ('Oh, What Have You Done for Me Lately?") Wilson?" has closed.
"Edwin Wilson"'s actual name is Edward Wilson, by the way. Despite our gaffe, he still won the poll.
Now, I have been researching how to calculate a statistical margin of error, and for this poll, ours is around 38%, and that's a best case scenario that assumes we took a random sampling of the population, which we did not.
Nonetheless, the folks at Ocean Moonshine have officially changed their opinion on the relative fames of Pinker and Wilson and removed the discussion of them referenced here.
I would also like to give a special shout-out to the one other person who voted for Steven Pinker. You really know what's what and who's who.

3 comments:

Mary Beth said...

Edward!!!! Who knew? Shouldn't we change the tag to Edward? (Or maybe just to whatshisname.)

Cindi said...

Yeah, maybe we should just go with E.O Wilson from now on. I didn't realize it until I looked up "Edwin Wilson" on Wikipedia, and there were lots of them, but none of them were him.

Mary Beth said...

I checked it out. One of them is Edwin Wilson, Provost of Wake Forest University. That's the one I'm thinking of! He taught Romantic Poetry and Blake, Yeats and Thomas!