The history of knocking on wood | Hacker News Reader

The history of knocking on wood

resobscura.substack.com

54 pointsbenbreen10 comments

As someone who was around in the 90ies, I think I would have found a way to work in the Bosstones, but it's pretty interesting just the same. I'll also have to look up what people write about "tocca ferro" in Italian.

The same expression "tocar ferro" was used traditionally in Catalan instead of knock on wood. Ferro translates as iron. Iron in this expression refers to a sword. More than trusting in good luck or some sort of supra natural protection, the expression "tocar ferro" conveys a sense of self reliance, of being prepared and confident.

"Pack heat" may be a modern use

Not uncommon that people will knock on their heads if nothing wooden is in arm‘s reach. (Which - head of wood - which I always see as a nice little act of humility)

It’s a fun article and interesting to muse over but I’m always skeptical of these kind of drive-by data analyses actually mean much.

1. Take a bunch of easily available data (which hasn’t been validated for completeness, accuracy, bias, etc)

2. Apply some easily available algorithmic analysis (that the author doesn’t have a deep understand of)

3. Put it in an easily available visualization (that has been chosen primarily to look nice)

4. Draw some conclusions and assert that is backed by data

They feel rigorous because “wow so much data” and novel because “you couldn’t do this before computers + internet” but there are so many ways to get it wrong and reach different conclusions if your data is bad or your algorithms are misapplied.

I honestly didn't feel like the article even feigned rigor.

It felt like some parent's personal blog ruminating on an idea, not an "article".

Claude followed links on a single Wikipedia article and visualized the results geographically for one image so the author could keep talking about how we (and he) know basically nothing.

Doesn't seem like it belongs on HN.

You're right, maybe I'm being a little mean to a personal blog post. It's just something I see all the time in other contexts as well. And we'll probably see it more and more with vibe coding.

I didn't think you were being mean, I thought you were giving them too much credit. Ha! =)

> Most of human nature is never written down — and machines can't learn it from text

Well, the conclusion of the article is that humans cannot either, it's not like humans have some magical conduit towards truth.

Why? I think the gist of the article is that there is a lot never clearly written down information that's passing between generations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com