5 ms·

> Gamblers may have seen dice throws as no longer determined by fate, but instead as randomizing objects governed by chance. Going by the principal that people

> Gamblers may have seen dice throws as no longer determined by fate, but instead as randomizing objects governed by chance. Going by the principal that people in the past weren’t dumb, just different, and had less access to information, I’m not convinced by the conclusion “they didn’t understand the odds, it was up to the gods”. That may be true for Joe Legionary losing his pay every week over dice, but you can bet your ass that the guy running the game, who probably supplied the dice and maybe even made them had a very good idea of how unfair they were.

dt5702 6y ago
I agree. People are people, those in the past didn’t have as much information as we do now but that doesn’t mean they weren’t as sharp. We do see development in ideas over time, but this is separate to the idea that if we don’t understand what they were doing then it must have been religion. Arguments to religion are a classic trope in archaeology. Although this doesn’t explicitly mention that this is the case, I think it’s worth pointing out that people would have known that all dice were fair, but some were fairer than others.
- de_watcher 6y ago
  Nowadays you have easier time to actually use hard information: build things faster and have impact. But the soft "information" (the one used to affect people directly) has never gone away, it has diversified and it's going strong.
wahern 6y ago
A few years ago a philosopher wrote an article in the New York Times that suggested that maybe the gods were real in antiquity, on the tacit presumption that belief in gods was then universal, such universality being a consequence of common and widespread divine manifestations that eradicated doubt. Of course, he was trying to be provocative, but I took issue with the presumption of universality. When I wrote to remind him that Plato briefly discussed atheists in The Laws, implying that atheism among young adults was common, though invariably transitioning to adherence to the local faith as they grew older and wiser[1], he replied with, "Oh, yeah, I forgot." [1] Of course, there's multiple ways to interpret Plato's argument, including 1) older, wiser people came to see the truth of the existence of the gods and 2) older, wiser people came to see the usefulness of shared belief in the gods, regardless of the actual existence of the gods.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- lqet 6y ago
  Here is the article, in case anyone is interested: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xy3GbfvBb6MJ:https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/did-zeus-exist/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xy3Gbf... > There is no current evidence of his present existence, but to deny that he existed in his Grecian heyday we need to assume that there was no good evidence for his existence available to the ancient Greeks. We have no reason to make this assumption. I would certainly be very surprised if the ancient Greeks had found a widely-used, accepted and accessible proof for the existence of (a) god, and no one of the classic philosophers even mentioned it in passing.
  - rightbyte 6y ago
    Was thunderstorms proof of Zeus' wrath? I believe it is quite hard now the comprehend what share they thought of the gods as mythology or literal.
- glandium 6y ago
  Sounds related to Julian Jaynes's book/theory: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
  - pure-awesome 6y ago
    Scott Alexander recently gave a good summary & review of that book here. A _very_ interesting hypothesis: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-...
  - dhosek 6y ago
    When I was taking psych classes in the late 90s, it seemed every single psych prof had a copy of this on their shelves. I saw it cited in some of the text books as well so I grabbed a used copy to read. It's an interesting hypothesis, but seems roughly as valid as Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods?, that is, not valid at all. Were there any validity to the claim at all, we should be able to find supporting evidence in, say, the brain function of lower primates. It ain't there.
Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago
I agree, and in fact most people in our times don't understand the odds either. At least in my country, where lottery is quite a big event especially in Christmas (almost everyone plays at that date, even if they don't play during the rest of the year), most people without a STEM background tend to believe things like lottery numbers starting with 0 being more unlikely to win, odd numbers being better than even numbers, or numbers that have already won being more likely (or unlikely) to win. They also queue to buy tickets at places that gave a big prize, thinking that they have a better chance to win (and funnily, since lots of tickets are bought at those places, it becomes a pseudo-self-fulfilling prophecy - they don't really have a better chance, of course, but those specific places keep pumping out prizes year after year due to the volume of tickets sold). I don't think those beliefs of our era are much more advanced that just attributing it to "the gods".
- laumars 6y ago
  I have my own theory on that and it's the same reason people believe in conspiracy theories. I think superstition, religion, conspiracy theories all have one thing in common: it's the explanation that random things we can't control are actually the result of someone else pulling the proverbial strings. I think some people need to feel like the world isn't chaotic but rather there is some hidden order to it. I think it gives them a sense of comfort, maybe even control over circumstances they ordinarily couldn't control.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    I'm not sure that is a controversial viewpoint. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1745691618774270 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916187742...
    - laumars 6y ago
      I didn't think nor suggest it was a controversial viewpoint. Thanks for the link though, it's an opinion I'd admittedly never researched to see if anyone else had written up on.
  - 6y ago
kingkawn 6y ago
Our descendants will look back with dismissive sympathy and say, "the poor things still believed in randomness and chance."
gwern 6y ago
> you can bet your ass that the guy running the game, who probably supplied the dice and maybe even made them had a very good idea of how unfair they were. I guess it depends on how good 'very good' is. We can be certain that gamblers did in fact misprice various things - after all, Pascal and much of the early work on probability theory was motivated by differences among gamblers about what payoffs were correct (eg 'the problem of the points'), and there are examples of very important things like lotteries or life insurance or annuities being mispriced (eg how Voltaire made his fortune).

dt5702 6y ago

I agree. People are people, those in the past didn’t have as much information as we do now but that doesn’t mean they weren’t as sharp. We do see development in ideas over time, but this is separate to the idea that if we don’t understand what they were doing then it must have been religion. Arguments to religion are a classic trope in archaeology. Although this doesn’t explicitly mention that this is the case, I think it’s worth pointing out that people would have known that all dice were fair, but some were fairer than others.

de_watcher 6y ago
Nowadays you have easier time to actually use hard information: build things faster and have impact. But the soft "information" (the one used to affect people directly) has never gone away, it has diversified and it's going strong.

wahern 6y ago

A few years ago a philosopher wrote an article in the New York Times that suggested that maybe the gods were real in antiquity, on the tacit presumption that belief in gods was then universal, such universality being a consequence of common and widespread divine manifestations that eradicated doubt. Of course, he was trying to be provocative, but I took issue with the presumption of universality. When I wrote to remind him that Plato briefly discussed atheists in The Laws, implying that atheism among young adults was common, though invariably transitioning to adherence to the local faith as they grew older and wiser[1], he replied with, "Oh, yeah, I forgot." [1] Of course, there's multiple ways to interpret Plato's argument, including 1) older, wiser people came to see the truth of the existence of the gods and 2) older, wiser people came to see the usefulness of shared belief in the gods, regardless of the actual existence of the gods.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lqet 6y ago
Here is the article, in case anyone is interested: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xy3GbfvBb6MJ:https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/31/did-zeus-exist/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:xy3Gbf... > There is no current evidence of his present existence, but to deny that he existed in his Grecian heyday we need to assume that there was no good evidence for his existence available to the ancient Greeks. We have no reason to make this assumption. I would certainly be very surprised if the ancient Greeks had found a widely-used, accepted and accessible proof for the existence of (a) god, and no one of the classic philosophers even mentioned it in passing.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  Was thunderstorms proof of Zeus' wrath? I believe it is quite hard now the comprehend what share they thought of the gods as mythology or literal.
glandium 6y ago
Sounds related to Julian Jaynes's book/theory: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
- pure-awesome 6y ago
  Scott Alexander recently gave a good summary & review of that book here. A _very_ interesting hypothesis: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-...
- dhosek 6y ago
  When I was taking psych classes in the late 90s, it seemed every single psych prof had a copy of this on their shelves. I saw it cited in some of the text books as well so I grabbed a used copy to read. It's an interesting hypothesis, but seems roughly as valid as Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods?, that is, not valid at all. Were there any validity to the claim at all, we should be able to find supporting evidence in, say, the brain function of lower primates. It ain't there.

Al-Khwarizmi 6y ago

I agree, and in fact most people in our times don't understand the odds either. At least in my country, where lottery is quite a big event especially in Christmas (almost everyone plays at that date, even if they don't play during the rest of the year), most people without a STEM background tend to believe things like lottery numbers starting with 0 being more unlikely to win, odd numbers being better than even numbers, or numbers that have already won being more likely (or unlikely) to win. They also queue to buy tickets at places that gave a big prize, thinking that they have a better chance to win (and funnily, since lots of tickets are bought at those places, it becomes a pseudo-self-fulfilling prophecy - they don't really have a better chance, of course, but those specific places keep pumping out prizes year after year due to the volume of tickets sold). I don't think those beliefs of our era are much more advanced that just attributing it to "the gods".

laumars 6y ago
I have my own theory on that and it's the same reason people believe in conspiracy theories. I think superstition, religion, conspiracy theories all have one thing in common: it's the explanation that random things we can't control are actually the result of someone else pulling the proverbial strings. I think some people need to feel like the world isn't chaotic but rather there is some hidden order to it. I think it gives them a sense of comfort, maybe even control over circumstances they ordinarily couldn't control.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  I'm not sure that is a controversial viewpoint. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1745691618774270 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916187742...
  - laumars 6y ago
    I didn't think nor suggest it was a controversial viewpoint. Thanks for the link though, it's an opinion I'd admittedly never researched to see if anyone else had written up on.
- 6y ago

kingkawn 6y ago

Our descendants will look back with dismissive sympathy and say, "the poor things still believed in randomness and chance."

gwern 6y ago

> you can bet your ass that the guy running the game, who probably supplied the dice and maybe even made them had a very good idea of how unfair they were. I guess it depends on how good 'very good' is. We can be certain that gamblers did in fact misprice various things - after all, Pascal and much of the early work on probability theory was motivated by differences among gamblers about what payoffs were correct (eg 'the problem of the points'), and there are examples of very important things like lotteries or life insurance or annuities being mispriced (eg how Voltaire made his fortune).