The Secret History of Knocking on Wood

My younger daughter, Nava, turned two last week.

我的小女儿纳瓦上周刚满两岁。

Among her favorite phrases are “No, Nava do it ” and “what da HECK.” Her favorite music, by a wide margin, is Elton John.

她最喜欢的短语是“不，纳瓦这样做”和“What da HECK”。她最喜欢的音乐是埃尔顿·约翰(Elton John)。

And her favorite gesture is a hearty, full-body nod.

她最喜欢的动作是衷心的全身点头。

She deploys this repertoire with enormous humor, precision, and grace.

她以极大的幽默、精确和优雅的方式运用了这些曲目。

I love being a parent.

我喜欢当父母。

The thing I find most fascinating about the experience is how it throws a mirror not just on one’s own childhood, but on all of human nature.

我发现这次经历最令人着迷的地方在于，它不仅为一个人自己的童年，也为整个人性提供了一面镜子。

It’s an obvious point, but one that I never thought about before having kids: all newborn babies are always the same, everywhere .

这是一个显而易见的观点，但我在生孩子之前从未想过：所有新生婴儿在任何地方都是一样的。

And then, slowly but surely, they become not the same.

然后，慢慢地但肯定地，它们变得不一样了。

As cultural and family influences accumulate like sedimentary layers in these tiny personalities, you can see nurture reshaping nature in a deeply embodied, physical way.

随着文化和家庭的影响在这些微小的个性中像沉积层一样积累，你可以看到教养以一种深刻体现的物理方式重塑自然。

One thing that Nava has got me thinking about is the deep history of gesture.

纳瓦让我思考的一件事是手势的深厚历史。

Gesture exists on the borderland between nature and nurture.

手势存在于先天与后天的边界上。

Certain physical actions are so universal that they communicate effectively not just across human societies but across species : bared teeth, for instance.

某些身体动作是如此普遍，以至于它们不仅可以在人类社会之间有效地进行交流，而且可以在物种之间进行有效的交流：例如，露出牙齿。

Other gestures encode more specific cultural patterns, but do so in a way that is more expansive than language.

其他手势编码了更具体的文化模式，但其方式比语言更广泛。

A few months ago, for instance, I watched my mother-in-law (who was born and raised in a village in northern Iran) teach Nava how to knock on wood for good luck.

例如，几个月前，我看到我的婆婆（她在伊朗北部的一个村庄出生和长大）教纳瓦如何敲木头以获得好运。

I hadn’t realized this was so widespread a practice until I checked Wikipedia and found that variants exist in Bulgaria ( chukam na dǎrvo ), Georgia ( kheze daḳaḳuneba ), Indonesia ( amit-amit jabang bayi ), Norway ( bank i bordet ) and some two dozen other countries.

我没有意识到这种做法如此普遍，直到我查了维基百科，发现保加利亚（chukam na dǎrvo）、格鲁吉亚（kheze daḳaḳuneba）、印度尼西亚（amit-amit jabang bayi）、挪威（bank i bordet）和其他大约两打国家都存在这种变体。

Why?

为什么？

Could we trace embodied behaviors through history just as anthropologists can trace, say, legends or etymologies relating to magical blacksmiths or slaying serpents?

我们能否像人类学家追踪与魔法铁匠或杀死蛇有关的传说或词源一样，在历史中追踪具体行为？

What I found is that written evidence for knocking on wood (and for the history of gesture as a whole) is remarkably sparse.

我发现敲木头（以及整个手势的历史）的书面证据非常稀少。

In the Penguin Guide to Superstitions , folklorist Steve Roud offers a skeptical take on the provenance of knocking on wood due to the near total absence of written records about it:

在《企鹅迷信指南》中，民俗学家史蒂夫·鲁德对敲木头的起源提出了怀疑，因为几乎完全没有关于敲木头的书面记录：

The two most popular explanations of origin are that the belief goes back to pagan times when we believed in tree spirits, or that we are invoking Christ’s protection by referring to the wood of the Cross.

关于起源的两种最流行的解释是，这种信仰可以追溯到异教时代，当时我们相信树精，或者我们通过提及十字架的木头来祈求基督的保护。

The former is nothing but guesswork, based on the conviction that all superstitions must be ancient, and it has the usual problem of spanning thousands of years with no evidence at all of its existence, or, for that matter, any evidence that ‘we’ ever believed in tree spirits.

前者只不过是猜测，基于这样的信念：所有迷信都必须是古老的，而且它的常见问题是跨越数千年，没有任何证据证明它的存在，或者就此而言，没有任何证据表明“我们”曾经相信过树精。

Roud then ventures a theory of his own: the custom, he argues, probably developed from a children’s game called Tig-touch-wood that was popular in early 19th century England.

随后，鲁德提出了自己的理论：他认为，这种习俗可能源自 19 世纪初英国流行的一种名为“Tig-touch-wood”的儿童游戏。

If true, the practice of knocking on wood for good luck is actually surprisingly new .

如果这是真的，那么敲木头求好运的做法实际上是令人惊讶的新鲜事。

The “Knocking on Wood” Wikipedia page mentions Roud’s conclusion, and this claim of a 19th century origin has circulated online as the final say on the matter.

维基百科的“敲木头”页面提到了鲁德的结论，这一源自 19 世纪的说法在网上流传，作为此事的最终决定权。

If you go back to the original, though, Roud’s proposal actually ends on an ambivalent note: “Before this theory [of 19th century origins] can be finally accepted, however, an examination of the history of European forms of this custom would be advisable.

然而，如果你回到原文，鲁德的提议实际上以一种矛盾的方式结束：“然而，在这个[起源于19世纪的]理论最终被接受之前，建议对这种习俗的欧洲形式的历史进行审查。

”

”

This is where historical data visualizations — of the type Claude Code can now produce on cue — can come in handy.

这就是历史数据可视化（Claude Code 现在可以根据提示生成的类型）可以派上用场的地方。

I downloaded a scientific paper about knocking on wood along with the crowd-sourced Wikipedia list, then provided it to Claude Code and asked it to plot the data on a three.js globe.

我下载了一篇关于敲木头的科学论文以及众包的维基百科列表，然后将其提供给 Claude Code 并要求其在 Three.js 地球仪上绘制数据。

Here’s the interactive version and the GitHub page .

这是交互式版本和 GitHub 页面。

What we see is that there are in fact two entangled traditions of “knocking on things for good luck”: touching iron, and touching wood.

我们看到，“敲东西”的传统实际上有两种纠缠在一起的传统：碰铁和碰木。

We also find that they are widely distributed, but also have a pretty clear cluster around the Mediterranean and Europe.

我们还发现它们分布广泛，但在地中海和欧洲周围也有相当明显的集群。

And, although it is difficult to find references to knocking wood for good luck before the nineteenth century, it turns out that this is not the case for touching iron — the “tocca ferro” of Italy, shown above.

而且，尽管在 19 世纪之前很难找到敲木头求好运的参考资料，但事实证明，碰铁（如上图所示的意大利“托卡铁”）的情况并非如此。

The upshot: I struggle to imagine a process whereby an obscure English children’s game somehow inspired gestural customs in Georgia, Egypt, Russia, and Iran within less than a century.

结果是：我很难想象一个不起眼的英国儿童游戏在不到一个世纪的时间内以某种方式激发了格鲁吉亚、埃及、俄罗斯和伊朗的手势习俗。

It seems more reasonable to me that these customs might instead originate in an ancient Mediterranean tradition of apotropaic magic, or charms intended to combat bad luck.

在我看来更合理的是，这些习俗可能起源于古代地中海的驱邪魔法传统，或者旨在对抗厄运的咒语。

For instance, here’s a snippet from an early modern translation of an Ancient Greek dream interpretation text, the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus:

例如，以下是古希腊解梦文本《阿特米多洛斯的梦魇批判》的早期现代翻译的片段：

This put me in mind of a recent New Yorker article by the anthropologist Manvir Singh.

这让我想起人类学家曼维尔·辛格最近在《纽约客》上发表的一篇文章。

The article is about the efforts of linguists and folklorists to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European mythology which links folk tales and gods from India to Ireland.

本文介绍了语言学家和民俗学家为重建原始印欧神话所做的努力，该神话将印度和爱尔兰的民间故事和神灵联系起来。

The serpent-slaying storm god, the Sky Father, the Divine Twins: these figures mutated and multiplied across cultures but retained their essential forms.

屠蛇风暴神、天空之父、神圣双胞胎：这些人物在不同文化中变异和繁殖，但保留了其基本形式。

Might the linkage between “stuff of iron” and “surety to those that are in doubt,” likewise, have an ancient pedigree via gestural traditions?

同样，“铁的东西”和“对那些有疑问的人的保证”之间的联系是否也有通过手势传统的古老血统？

Notable here is the fact that one of the oldest known fairy tales involves iron-working: “The Smith and the Devil.” A study from 2013 concluded that this story template, which associates iron-working skill with magic, was traceable back at least 6,000 years.

值得注意的是，已知最古老的童话故事之一涉及炼铁：“史密斯和魔鬼”。 2013 年的一项研究得出结论，这个将炼铁技术与魔法联系在一起的故事模板至少可以追溯到 6000 年前。

Then again, maybe it all really does go back to Tiggy-Touch-Wood.

话又说回来，也许这一切真的可以追溯到蒂吉·塔奇·伍德。

The truth is that we really do know shockingly little about the history of gesture.

事实是，我们对手势的历史确实知之甚少。

Res Obscura is a reader-supported publication.

Res Obscura 是一本由读者支持的出版物。

To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

要接收新帖子并支持我的工作，请考虑成为免费或付费订阅者。

The history of most human gestures is never written down, precisely because it is something we learn before literacy or memory and thus something we take entirely for granted.

大多数人类手势的历史从未被记录下来，正是因为它是我们在识字或记忆之前学习的东西，因此我们完全认为这是理所当然的。

Another example: why do so many languages implicitly view the right hand as good (for instance, associating the direction right with the ethical concept of rightness ) and the left hand as bad, maladroit, sinister ?

另一个例子：为什么这么多语言隐含地认为右手是好的（例如，将正确的方向与正确的道德概念联系起来）而左手是坏的、笨拙的、险恶的？

I found this article on the subject, and decided to turn that data into a visualization, too.

我找到了有关该主题的这篇文章，并决定也将这些数据转化为可视化。

The author of the article, the German anthropologist Wulf Schiefenhövel, writes:

这篇文章的作者、德国人类学家沃尔夫·席芬霍维尔 (Wulf Schiefenhövel) 写道：

I find it plausible to think that early humans began to observe, to feel the difference between right and left, and to ascribe qualities like “clumsy,” “awkward,” “crooked,” and “tired” to the less dexterous hand (it is interesting that these very terms still show up prominently in today’s modern languages) and correspondingly positive qualities to the right hand preferred by the majority.

我觉得这样的想法是合理的：早期人类开始观察、感受左右手之间的差异，并将“笨拙”、“笨拙”、“弯曲”和“疲倦”等品质归因于不太灵巧的手（有趣的是，这些术语仍然在当今的现代语言中显着出现），并将相应的积极品质归因于大多数人喜欢的右手。

This process, intertwining emotion and cognition, can well be expressed in the terms of embodiment...

这个情感与认知交织的过程，可以很好地用具身化的术语来表达……

The semantic values with which the terms for left and right are charged in almost all the languages examined for this survey could have their origin in this very process: embodiment turned into words.

在本次调查中检查的几乎所有语言中，左和右术语所具有的语义价值都可能起源于这个过程：体现转化为单词。

Singh’s New Yorker article ends by asking what these sorts of searches for common origins tell us: “that our wild, warring species shares something irreducible at its core.”

辛格在《纽约客》的文章最后询问，这些对共同起源的搜索告诉我们什么：“我们野生的、交战的物种在其核心上有一些不可还原的东西。”

But they also point to something we don’t share with the other new pseudo-intelligences emerging today: machine intelligence.

但他们也指出了我们与当今出现的其他新的伪智能所不共有的东西：机器智能。

So many of our latent assumptions about selfhood, reality, and consciousness flow from our embodiment as physical beings and from the deep histories of gesture and other forms of implicit knowledge.

我们对自我、现实和意识的许多潜在假设都源于我们作为物质存在的体现，以及手势和其他形式的隐性知识的深层历史。

Why do I, my mother-in-law, and Nava all knock on wood?

为什么我、我婆婆和纳瓦都敲木头？

None of us really know.

我们谁也不知道。

Perhaps it’s a legacy of the Bronze Age; perhaps it’s a meme from Victorian Britain.

也许这是青铜时代的遗产；也许这是来自维多利亚时代英国的模因。

What is certain is that it’s not something a robot with an LLM-based brain is going to do habitually, just as robots will never share in mental frameworks deriving from quirks of our physical architecture, like handedness.

可以肯定的是，拥有法学硕士学位的大脑的机器人不会习惯性地做这些事情，就像机器人永远不会分享源自我们身体结构怪癖的心理框架，比如惯用手。

The history of gesture, in other words, bears directly upon the question of AI alignment.

换句话说，手势的历史直接关系到人工智能对齐的问题。

Humans across cultures and times intuitively maintain a set of semantic and ethical judgements rooted in our physicality, our learned and instinctive gestures, and the affordances of the natural world.

跨文化、跨时代的人类直观地维持着一套语义和道德判断，这些判断植根于我们的身体、我们习得的和本能的手势以及自然世界的可供性。

There is just something “knockable” about wood.

木头有一种“可敲击”的感觉。

LLMs don’t have childhood memories of jumping over cracks in pavement or their grandmother teaching them gestures.

法学硕士没有童年跳过人行道裂缝的记忆，也没有祖母教他们手势的记忆。

Moreover, such things are not really in their training data either.

而且，这些东西也并不真正存在于他们的训练数据中。

For this reason, machines without our embodied experience may think they are aligning their behavior with human norms, but they will never be able to feel the physical basis for some of those norms.

因此，没有我们的具体经验的机器可能会认为它们正在使自己的行为符合人类规范，但它们永远无法感受到其中一些规范的物理基础。

I have been thinking a lot lately about “diachronic AI” and “vintage LLMs” — language models designed to index a particular slice of historical sources rather than to hoover up all data available.

我最近一直在思考“历时人工智能”和“老式法学硕士”——旨在索引特定历史来源片段而不是收集所有可用数据的语言模型。

I’ll have more to say about this in a future post, but one thing that came to mind while writing this one is the point made by AI safety researcher Owain Evans about how such models could be trained:

我将在以后的文章中对此进行更多讨论，但在撰写本文时想到的一件事是人工智能安全研究员 Owain Evans 提出的关于如何训练此类模型的观点：

One challenge is having enough training data.

挑战之一是拥有足够的训练数据。

Another is that the training data needs to be free of contamination.

另一个是训练数据需要不受污染。

For a model trained up till 1900, there needs to be no information from after 1900 that leaks into the data.

对于 1900 年之前训练的模型，不需要 1900 年之后的信息泄漏到数据中。

Some metadata might have that kind of leakage.

某些元数据可能会出现这种泄漏。

While it’s not possible to have zero leakage - there’s a shadow of the future on past data because what we store is a function of what we care about - it’s possible to have a very low level of leakage, sufficient for this to be interesting.

虽然零泄漏是不可能的——过去的数据存在未来的阴影，因为我们存储的内容是我们关心的函数——但泄漏的水平可能非常低，足以让这一点变得有趣。

You can include multimodal data like images.

您可以包含图像等多模态数据。

There’s something strange about including images when going back to Roman times or 1700 because while they had texts, they didn’t have digital images.

追溯到罗马时代或 1700 年，包含图像有些奇怪，因为虽然他们有文本，但没有数字图像。

However, this is acceptable for some purposes.

然而，这对于某些目的来说是可以接受的。

You’d want to avoid leaking information that could only be known in the present.

您希望避免泄露目前只能知道的信息。

You could include things people at the time could see and experience themselves.

你可以包括当时人们可以亲眼看到和体验到的东西。

For example, there may be no anatomically accurate painting in Roman times of a bee or an egg cracking, but you can include such images because people could see such things, even if they weren’t part of their recorded media.

例如，罗马时代可能没有解剖学上准确的蜜蜂或鸡蛋破裂的绘画，但您可以包含此类图像，因为人们可以看到这些东西，即使它们不是记录媒体的一部分。

You could also have pictures of buildings and artifacts that we still have from the past.

您还可以拥有我们仍然拥有的过去的建筑物和文物的照片。

That last observation, about training vintage language models on images of the physical world, is, I think, a fascinating one.

我认为，关于根据物理世界的图像训练老式语言模型的最后一个观察是一个令人着迷的观察。

Consider Nava.

考虑纳瓦。

Another of her favorite phrases is “I seein’ it!”

她最喜欢的另一个短语是“我看到了！”

And reader, let me tell you: Nava is, indeed, seeing it.

读者，让我告诉你：纳瓦确实看到了这一点。

Really seeing it.

真的看到了。

Whatever it happens to be, Nava is (so it seems to me) seeing it with a freshness of perception, a joyful richness of observation, that my 40-year-old eyes simply cannot equal.

无论发生什么，纳瓦（在我看来）都以一种新鲜的感知、一种令人愉悦的丰富观察来看待它，这是我 40 岁的眼睛根本无法比拟的。

I suspect rather strongly that premodern people, too, experienced the physical world more acutely than I do, simply because my brain has been stewing in dopamine-spiking stimuli for four decades now, rarely pausing to touch the proverbial grass.

我相当强烈地怀疑，前现代人也比我更敏锐地体验了物质世界，仅仅是因为我的大脑四十年来一直在多巴胺刺激下沸腾，很少停下来触摸众所周知的草。

Don’t get me wrong: I like the outdoors a lot.

不要误会我的意思：我非常喜欢户外活动。

But my waking existence is spent mostly indoors in highly artificial spaces, whereas humans have typically spent the vast majority of their time outdoors in nature.

但我醒着的时候大部分时间都是在室内高度人工的空间里度过的，而人类通常大部分时间都是在户外的大自然中度过的。

Consider my ancestors, who, as best I can tell, were primarily illiterate peasants and smallhold farmers.

想想我的祖先，据我所知，他们主要是文盲农民和小农。

They spent a significant proportion of their waking hours literally touching grass.

他们醒着的大部分时间都花在接触草地上。

I wonder how much this world of gesture and of the senses — the things we see, feel, hear, smell, and taste — is implicitly embedded in the textual corpora we humans produce and in the value judgements we derive from it.

我想知道这个手势和感官的世界——我们看到的、感觉到的、听到的、闻到的和尝到的东西——在多大程度上隐含在我们人类产生的文本语料库以及我们从中得出的价值判断中。

When we hold truths to be self-evident, is a sense memory of the physical act of holding somehow contributing to the meaning (is it, in fact, helping to “carry” or “support” that meaning?)

当我们认为真理是不言而喻的时，对持有的身体行为的感觉记忆是否会以某种方式有助于该意义（事实上，它是否有助于“承载”或“支持”该意义？）

Owain Evans’ idea of feeding a historical LLM non-anachronistic images is, I think, well worth doing.

我认为，欧文·埃文斯（Owain Evans）为历史性的法学硕士提供非时代错误图像的想法是非常值得做的。

But it’s also worth expanding on further.

但它也值得进一步扩展。

Would it be helpful, when training a historical LLM, to simulate dream imagery based on premodern themes?

在训练历史学法学硕士时，根据前现代主题模拟梦境意象会有帮助吗？

What about audio of birdcalls, which were far more prominent in the audioscapes of premodern people?

那么鸟叫声的音频呢？这种声音在前现代人的音景中更为突出？

What about taking it on a walk through the woods?

带着它去树林里散步怎么样？

Would an AI model trained on such things be not just more authentically premodern, but more authentically aligned with implicit human values?

经过此类训练的人工智能模型不仅会更真实地前现代，而且会更真实地符合隐含的人类价值观吗？

The converse is also worth asking — whether simulating artificial environments (for instance a 3d representation of a Youtube video) might have unintended negative consequences.

相反的情况也值得一问——模拟人工环境（例如 Youtube 视频的 3D 表示）是否可能会产生意想不到的负面后果。

Fei-Fei Li’s startup World Labs, which aims to make the leading “world model” — an alternative to language models based on tokenizing physical space rather than words — recently raised a substantial amount of money .

李飞飞的初创公司 World Labs 旨在打造领先的“世界模型”——一种基于标记物理空间而不是单词的语言模型的替代品——最近筹集了一大笔资金。

As consumer-facing robots become more plausible, the business case for such a model is obvious.

随着面向消费者的机器人变得越来越可行，这种模型的商业案例是显而易见的。

But what physical spaces are “world” models actually being trained on?

但“世界”模型实际上是在哪些物理空间上进行训练的？

The contemporary physical environment, sound-proofed, plastic-coated, and artificially-colored, is radically different from the environment that Homo sapiens evolved to excel in.

当代的物理环境，隔音、塑料涂层和人工着色，与智人进化所适应的环境截然不同。

This sort of thing is why I think historians need to be more active in technical discussions and decision-making about emerging technology.

这类事情就是为什么我认为历史学家需要更加积极地参与有关新兴技术的技术讨论和决策。

Everything about our current world is different from the premodern world that our ancestors inhabited.

我们当前世界的一切都与我们祖先居住的前现代世界不同。

The past truly is a foreign country.

过去确实是异国他乡。

But we carry fragments of that foreign world with us in our physical selves, in the gestures and other implicit knowledge we teach our kids.

但我们的身体、手势和我们教给孩子的其他隐性知识中都带有那个异国世界的碎片。

We take it for granted that there are aspects of being human which are never written down and which are unknowable unless you experience them.

我们理所当然地认为，人类的某些方面是永远不会被记录下来的，除非你亲身经历，否则是不可知的。

AI systems, locked in their data-worlds of text or simulated 3D environments, never even come close to this implicit knowledge.

人工智能系统被锁定在文本数据世界或模拟 3D 环境中，永远无法接近这种隐性知识。

Not yet, at least.

至少现在还没有。

• “What not reading does to your writing.” Lincoln Michel is one of my favorite chroniclers of life as a professional writer, and the point he concludes on here really is the simplest, most effective advice I can give to anyone who wants to write better: “The best way for this author to improve their writing is simple.

• “不读书会对你的写作产生什么影响。”林肯·米歇尔（Lincoln Michel）是我最喜欢的职业作家生活记录者之一，他在这里总结的观点确实是我可以给任何想要写得更好的人的最简单、最有效的建议：“这位作家提高写作的最佳方法很简单。

They should read a few good books.” I notice it in myself.

他们应该读一些好书。”我自己也注意到了这一点。

When I am not actively reading fiction, my writing gets more flat.

当我不积极阅读小说时，我的写作会变得更加平淡。

• “Archaeologists Say They’ve Identified Traces of a 2,000-Year-Old Love Note Still Etched Into a Wall in Ancient Pompeii.” ( Smithsonian ).

• “考古学家称，他们在古庞贝古城的墙壁上发现了 2000 年前的情书痕迹。” （史密森尼）。

• Every time I teach world history, I make a point of showing things like the above to my students and reading them Philip Larkin’s “ An Arundel Tomb ”:

• 每次我教授世界历史时，我都会特意向我的学生展示上述内容，并给他们朗读菲利普·拉金 (Philip Larkin) 的《阿伦德尔墓》：

Singapore and parts of China has touch wood for fortune and protection but not knock.

新加坡和中国部分地区有碰木求财和保护的作用，但不敲木。

North American Chinese people hang a round mirror facing the front door for protection against evil but not Chinese people in China because that's bad feng shui.

北美华人在前门挂一面圆镜以避邪，但在中国的华人则不然，因为那样风水不好。

Left hand is the clean hand in certain parts of Buddhism (I last heard of that in a Buddhist temple in Sichuan province), while right hand is the dirty hand, the reasoning is that because your left hand is clumsy you don't use it to wipe your ass or hold a cleaver.

在佛教的某些地方，左手是干净的手（我上次听说是在四川的一个佛教寺庙里），而右手是肮脏的手，原因是因为你的左手很笨拙，所以你不会用它来擦屁股或拿菜刀。

I witnessed all those and had the people explain them to me, but I can't find anything online so people accused me of lying and making things up.

我亲眼目睹了这一切，并让人们向我解释，但我在网上找不到任何内容，所以人们指责我撒谎和捏造事实。

Heck, I ate jiaozi with rice/glass noodles in it all my life and when I wrote that in a story someone on the Internet accused me of lying/making it up because they never saw that and it doesn't show up on google search.

哎呀，我一生都在吃饺子和米/粉丝，当我在一个故事中写下这个故事时，互联网上有人指责我撒谎/编造，因为他们从未见过这一点，而且它也没有出现在谷歌搜索中。

I ate that jiaozi all my life, my grandfather and many relatives made and still make jiaozi that way.

我一生都吃那个饺子，我的祖父和许多亲戚都这样做过，现在仍然这样做。

Other people from that region still make jiaozi that way.

该地区的其他人仍然这样做饺子。

It's not just a matter of machine can't learn when there's no text, humans should also stop judging things based on the existence of text.

这不仅仅是机器在没有文本时无法学习的问题，人类也应该停止根据文本的存在来判断事物。

Because I'm pretty sure that's discrimination against small groups with traditions never written down.

因为我很确定这是对从未被记录下来的传统的小群体的歧视。

I shouldn't need the existence of an academic paper to prove the jiaozi recipe passed down over many generations.

我不需要一篇学术论文的存在来证明世代相传的饺子配方。

Often when I read your writing, I think of something I want to say back to you, and surprisingly often, you bring it up in the next paragraph.

通常，当我读你的文章时，我会想起一些我想对你说的话，令人惊讶的是，你经常在下一段中提到它。

Touch grass, Fei Fei's research, are only the most prominent examples for me in this piece.

菲菲的研究《触摸草》只是我这篇文章中最突出的例子。

But you didn't ever bring up multiple origins, which would seem the most obvious first hypothesis about touch-benedictions.

但你从未提出过多重起源，这似乎是关于触摸祝福的最明显的第一个假设。

I talked to bees before I ever learned there was tradition of "telling the bees" and your daughter likely has dozens of similar habits she was not taught by you, most of which she might forget by age 3 and never do again.

在我得知有“告诉蜜蜂”的传统之前，我曾与蜜蜂交谈过，而您的女儿可能有数十种类似的习惯，但她不是您教给她的，其中大多数她可能会在 3 岁时忘记，并且再也不会这样做。

Not sure how to think about this but it might be there is a natural or more universal animism, and then a diverse cultural response: like the PIE word h₂ŕtḱos, meaning bear, which developed into Latin ursus and Greek arktos.

不知道如何思考这一点，但可能存在一种自然的或更普遍的万物有灵论，然后是一种多样化的文化反应：就像 PIE 单词 h2ŕtḱos，意思是熊，它发展成拉丁语 ursus 和希腊语 arktos。

Then the many euphemisms from honey eater and brown one that different cultures adopted to prevent saying the name of the feared predator.

然后是不同文化采用的许多来自食蜜者和棕色者的委婉语，以防止说出令人恐惧的掠食者的名字。

The talking to and touching, in this analogy, is an emergent behavior but the specific form (bees or figurines and wood or metal) becomes ritual with a literature that can be traced historically.

在这个类比中，交谈和触摸是一种自然发生的行为，但特定的形式（蜜蜂或雕像、木头或金属）成为带有可以历史追溯的文学的仪式。