The history of knocking on wood

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.

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.

> 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.