That's a stretch. Most early "gambling" was a way of putting the choice to the gods.
Or maybe intellectual refers to someone a position in a society that sufficiently well-off to be able to support some guy not having to provide work for collective survival and who can spend time trying to formalize abstract thinking for which writing would help with (which north americans natives did not have)
It's ok, it can be an interesting culture worthy of being studied, and of course they weren't dummies, but trying to pretend that north american natives were "contemplating concepts like the law of large numbers" without writing device or support nor some kind of alphabet, come on
Yes colonization is awful and yes the natives were genocided but that doesn't mean that everyone was on its way too landing on the moon had they not been suppressed both physically and culturally. The path to civilization only gets narrower and the people who get to contribute meaningfully fewer and fewer.
Before you toss the coin, God has determined with full certainty on which side it will land based on everything riding on that coin toss and all the third-order consequences, in His infinite wisdom. It cannot land on any side other than the preordained. The way you find God's will is to flip the coin.
To the pre-statistical brain it was unthinkable (and probably blasphemeous) to perform any sort of expected value calculation on this.
We know today that the frequency is useful for making decisions around the individual throws. Back then, that connection just wasn't there. Each throw was considered its own unique event.
(We can still see this in e.g. statistically illiterate fans of football. Penalty kicks are a relatively stable random process -- basically a weighted coin toss. Yet you'll see fans claim each penalty kick is a unique event completely disconnected from the long-run frequency.)
Statistics is a very young invention. As far as we know, it didn't exist in meaningful form anywhere on Earth until the 1600s. (However, if it existed in the Americas earlier than that, that would explain why it suddenly popped up in Europe in the 1600s...)
----
Important edit: What I know about this comes mostly from Weisberg's Willful Ignorance as well as A World of Chance by Brenner, Brenner, and Brown. These authors' research is based mostly on European written sources, meaning the emphasis is on how Europeans used to think about this.
It's possible different conceptualisations of probability existed elsewhere. It's possible even fully-fledged statistical reasoning existed, although it seems unlikely because it is the sort of thing that relies heavily on written records, and those would come up in research. But it's possible! That's what I meant by the last parenthetical – maybe Europeans didn't invent it at all, but were merely inspired by existing American practice.
It's pretty common, for example, to believe that God is on our side and we will win the war or somesuch. Actually walking onto a battlefield with a literal expectation of divine intervention... much less as common. Pious generals still believe in tactics, steel and suchlike. Not always... but usually.
European pre-modern writers were mostly very pious. The works preserved are likewise very pious. Greek philosophers were often closer to atheists than later Christians.
And also, the esteem in recognizing them as prefiguring a skill or system of thought that fund managers and FDA panels use today. In a roundabout way, it praises our own society’s systems by recognizing an ancient civilization for potentially having discovered some of their mathematical preliminaries.
For that matter, people who were pretty fatalist were still capable of using chance for purposes of fairness. The democrats in ancient Athens come to mind. I'm also pretty sure the (Christian) apostles' use of chance was also more about avoiding a human making the decision, than about divination.
Athenians selected through sortition didn't seem to act much like they believed they were chosen by the gods, and they defended their institutions mainly as wisdom, not as revelation.
And the apostles, being Jews, had a big taboo about using chance to determine God's will, but apparently not against using chance to fill vacancies.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel%2010...
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2016%3...
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2016%...
Please don't just shake links out of your sleeve, and talk to me instead. Do you think the Athenians acted like they were chosen by the gods when their number came up?
Don't you see a difference between the situations where chance could clearly have been used simply as a mechanism for fairness / avoiding a biased choice, and things like reading the movement of the birds or interpreting the shape of molten lead thrown into water?
Even in things like the goat choice in the bible you link above, I think it may be more about fairness than divination. Because as far as I know, the priests actually got to eat the sacrificial goat, but not the scapegoat they chased into the wild. So was it really about divining which goat God hated more, or was it maybe about "don't cheat by keeping the juicy goat for yourselves and chasing away the mangy one!"?
> No prehistoric dice have ever been discovered in the eastern part of North America.
Come on, you don’t really think modern statistics might’ve come about from Europeans taking inspiration in the gambling practices of nomadic peoples in remote southwestern parts of North America. No need to pay lip service to every scold.
We can actually tell from their dice that they don’t.
I believe in the book Against the Gods the author described ancient dice being—mostly—uneven. (One exception, I believe, was ancient Egypt.) The thinking was a weird-looking dice looks the most intuitively random. It wasn’t until later, when the average gambler started statistically reasoning, that standardized dice became common.
These dice are highly non-standard. In their own way, their similarity to other cultures of antiquities’ senses of randomness is kind of beautiful.
Edit: It wasn't quite that, but very nearly: start reading paragraph 5 in http://www.edwardothorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Physi...
In the next article in the series, he explains that in practice, roulette wheels are often tilted and that can be used to gain a further advantage: http://www.edwardothorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Physi...
This discovery pushes the history of dice from 5K years to 12K years.
These aren't quite as symmetric. I guess humans had to wait longer to discover some of the platonic solids.
This golden icosahedron of orders of magnitude more recent vintage is quite a beauty
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333949003_A_Numbere...
Don't train your AI on that
I imagine a parallel world where chips are shaped like empty cones, so they can pilled but they are very bad as a D2. (Perhaps a world where chips are shaped like cubes is more realistic, also bad as D2.)
https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/object/NMAI...
Really? That's what this is motivated by? Plain old boring science and more objective documentation of artifacts aren't good enough reasons?
How is anything being suppressed if there are a ton of random stories constantly being published about Native Americans apparently being secret geniuses with magical powers?
This is borderline racist. NBC has really gone down the shitter.
> Madden left legal practice in 2017 and started independent research on the Olmec civilization, an early Mesoamerican population, before he began a master’s program in archaeology — his “original love” — in 2022.
At least they're honest about who they're interviewing and leave it up to the reader to decide credibility?
.. towards who? Or do you feel personally offended when Native Americans are in the news?