> Nonetheless, he said, his research offers evidence that Native Americans were doing complex counting and were likely to have been the first humans to contemplate concepts like the law of large numbers, a mathematics concept that describes how a random sample will trend toward an equal distribution over time.
That's a stretch. Most early "gambling" was a way of putting the choice to the gods.
If his evidence of complex counting is convincing, then it's not implausible to me that they soon also had some rudimentary understanding of e.g. coin flip frequencies.
That's not how pre-statistical reasoning works. We have known for a long time that coins tend to land on either side around half the time. But before statistics, the outcome of any individual coin toss was considered "not uncertain, merely unknown".
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 author's 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 not implausible to me that they soon also had some rudimentary understanding of e.g. coin flip frequencies
We can actually tell from their dice design 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 is most 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.
Very interesting. The earliest example of the familiar cube shaped dice I know if is from Indus valley civilisation from around 2600 BC, closely followed by Mesopotamian dice.
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
Can we call it a D2? I'd call it a non-monetary-gaming-fair-coin, but it's hard to reduce it to a 4 letter word like "coin" or "dice" that most people would understand.
> “It’s an incredibly exciting finding, because for so long, the intellectual aspects of native Native American cultures have really been sidelined, if not consciously suppressed by colonial powers,” Wiener said.
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?
No such thing as a "Native American", only period inhabitants. Let's stop with the my land my history nonsense. No borders humanism means political categories are useless for authentic discussions.
Such pearl clutching nonsense. Period inhabitants where? You still have to give a geographical location, and modern monikers are the most logical and productive to use -- everyone knows where we're talking about, even if they're not domain experts.
No, people "know" what others have told them through revisionist history and politically convenient narratives. "Native Americans" have dibs on cultural and 'burial' sites that prevent scientists from proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Indians are not of the same group that inhabited lands thousands of years ago.
Yes, period inhabitants of a location, not blanket terms that imply far more than is aligned with genuine discussions. Time to move past the politically convenient.
> Nonetheless, he said, his research offers evidence that Native Americans were doing complex counting and were likely to have been the first humans to contemplate concepts like the law of large numbers, a mathematics concept that describes how a random sample will trend toward an equal distribution over time.
That's a stretch. Most early "gambling" was a way of putting the choice to the gods.
People used to play board games to gamble/predict, for sure; but they also liked a moneyless/careless play.
If his evidence of complex counting is convincing, then it's not implausible to me that they soon also had some rudimentary understanding of e.g. coin flip frequencies.
That's not how pre-statistical reasoning works. We have known for a long time that coins tend to land on either side around half the time. But before statistics, the outcome of any individual coin toss was considered "not uncertain, merely unknown".
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 author's 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.
That sounds like one very narrow cultural perspective.
Yes, I meant to mention that but forgot in my eagerness to respond. Sorry and thanks for clarifying!
> it's not implausible to me that they soon also had some rudimentary understanding of e.g. coin flip frequencies
We can actually tell from their dice design 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 is most 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.
Very interesting. The earliest example of the familiar cube shaped dice I know if is from Indus valley civilisation from around 2600 BC, closely followed by Mesopotamian dice.
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...
> The dice are almost always two-sided
Don't train your AI on that
Can we call it a D2? I'd call it a non-monetary-gaming-fair-coin, but it's hard to reduce it to a 4 letter word like "coin" or "dice" that most people would understand.
Chip
That's gonna trigger some gambling addicts.
I found this in Google, IIUC it's a ~1900 version or something similar enough.
https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/object/NMAI...
> “It’s an incredibly exciting finding, because for so long, the intellectual aspects of native Native American cultures have really been sidelined, if not consciously suppressed by colonial powers,” Wiener said.
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?
No such thing as a "Native American", only period inhabitants. Let's stop with the my land my history nonsense. No borders humanism means political categories are useless for authentic discussions.
Such pearl clutching nonsense. Period inhabitants where? You still have to give a geographical location, and modern monikers are the most logical and productive to use -- everyone knows where we're talking about, even if they're not domain experts.
No, people "know" what others have told them through revisionist history and politically convenient narratives. "Native Americans" have dibs on cultural and 'burial' sites that prevent scientists from proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Indians are not of the same group that inhabited lands thousands of years ago.
Yes, period inhabitants of a location, not blanket terms that imply far more than is aligned with genuine discussions. Time to move past the politically convenient.