8 ms·

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

by kqr 7mo ago

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 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.

mkl 7mo ago
That sounds like one very narrow cultural perspective.
- kqr 7mo ago
  Yes, I meant to mention that but forgot in my eagerness to respond. Sorry and thanks for clarifying!
  - junofan 7mo ago
    From TFA: > 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.
    - Pay08 7mo ago
      I don't, when the much more likely answer is that it came from the more than a millenia old gambling practices of Europe.
- vintermann 7mo ago
  Fatalism is widespread, but not nearly universal enough that we can say it was the norm 15000 years ago. 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.
  - kstenerud 7mo ago
    Are you quite sure of that? Historians would beg to differ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleromancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleromancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyche
    - vintermann 7mo ago
      I'm not saying divination isn't a thing, I'm saying there are examples of use of chance where it doesn't seem like 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.
      - kstenerud 7mo ago
        That's actually the opposite of the historical evidence. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel%2010%3A20-21&version=ESV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel%2010... https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2016%3A33&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2016%3... https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2016%3A8-10&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2016%...
        vintermann 7mo ago
        There are bible passages suggesting the outcome of lots is God's will, and there are passages condemning divination. You can find them from the same links you posted above. But at the time of the apostles, it was a no-no to use chance to figure out God's will. 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!"?
- odyssey7 7mo ago
  Yes, but so too is a modern western framing of these “dice” as “gambling” objects. 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.
  - culi 7mo ago
    They found 239 unique sets of dice from 130 tribes across 30 linguistic stocks. Although many of them are "binary lots" there is clear evidence that games of chance are extremely widespread in ancient North America > His final report includes illustrations and descriptions of 293 unique sets of Native American dice from “130 tribes belonging to 30 linguistic stocks,” and it notes that “from no tribe [do dice] appear to have been absent”. In addition, Culin cites and quotes at length 149 ethnographic accounts of how these dice were used to power games of chance and for gambling. Based on this record, Culin suggested that “the wide distribution and range of variations in the dice games points to their high antiquity”. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/article/-/E38C7B1F4CE7F417D8EFAC5AFEEF20A2 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/a...
- DaedalusII 7mo ago
  yeah man these boys were definitely doing bayesian probability and gaussian distributions to operate their sea shell based barter economy
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
netcan 7mo ago
Anytime you bring God into it... the concept of truth has the option of getting very abstract. 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.
calf 7mo ago
That has barely to do with my specific point. The researcher in TFA said if they were doing complex counting then blah blah blah. The general insight is that complex counting would force some kind of Bayesian or probabilistic reasoning even one that is informal, intuitive, rudimentary or partly incorrect. Whereas a theory of divining stones usage would have very little actual complex counting involved, maybe they had the tribal equivalent of fortune slips, and so they would not be cognitively challenged to reason about dice. What constitutes complex counting, I don't know, ask the researcher. But IMO it's not out realm of impossibility and time and again we have discovered the old ones of Homo sapiens were more cognitively/intellectually sophisticated than these kinds of scientists assumed earlier. I'm not wedded to this, it would be hard to prove, especially as a hypothesis involving human cognitive constraints/evolution, but I won't dismiss it as completely implausible either. It is an interesting if-then "archaeological cognitive science" argument, that's all.
tech_ken 7mo ago
> 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...) > It's possible different conceptualisations of probability existed elsewhere. Rudimentary sampling theory 100% predates 17th century Europe: https://ckraju.net/wordpress_F/?p=55 https://ckraju.net/wordpress_F/?p=55
culi 7mo ago
From the original work: > In a landmark article, foundational to the field of behavioral economics, Tversky and Kahneman (Reference Tversky and Kahneman1974:1130) argued that humans do not infer the statistical regularities embedded in everyday experience because they “are not coded appropriately”—meaning that the quantitative features inherent in these experiences are not isolated, noted, and organized in ways that reveal probabilistic patterns that are usually obscured by the noise of other incoming experience. Intriguingly, Native American dice games appear to perform such a “coding” function. They produce a simplified stream of random events that are carefully observed and recorded at multiple levels: in the scoring of individual dice throws, in the keeping of cumulative scores in single matches, and in tallying wins and losses in multiple matches over time as recorded by the giving or receiving of goods. Therefore, by observing and recording the patterns appearing in these outcomes, ancient Native American dice players repeatedly presented themselves with the very type of “coded” experiences that Tversky and Kahneman (Reference Tversky and Kahneman1974) argued would allow humans to observe and infer the presence of underlying probabilistic regularities. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/article/-/E38C7B1F4CE7F417D8EFAC5AFEEF20A2 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/a...

by kqr 7mo ago

mkl 7mo ago

That sounds like one very narrow cultural perspective.

kqr 7mo ago
Yes, I meant to mention that but forgot in my eagerness to respond. Sorry and thanks for clarifying!
- junofan 7mo ago
  From TFA: > 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.
  - Pay08 7mo ago
    I don't, when the much more likely answer is that it came from the more than a millenia old gambling practices of Europe.
vintermann 7mo ago
Fatalism is widespread, but not nearly universal enough that we can say it was the norm 15000 years ago. 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.
- kstenerud 7mo ago
  Are you quite sure of that? Historians would beg to differ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleromancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleromancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyche
  - vintermann 7mo ago
    I'm not saying divination isn't a thing, I'm saying there are examples of use of chance where it doesn't seem like 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.
    - kstenerud 7mo ago
      That's actually the opposite of the historical evidence. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel%2010%3A20-21&version=ESV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel%2010... https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2016%3A33&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2016%3... https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2016%3A8-10&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus%2016%...
      - vintermann 7mo ago
        There are bible passages suggesting the outcome of lots is God's will, and there are passages condemning divination. You can find them from the same links you posted above. But at the time of the apostles, it was a no-no to use chance to figure out God's will. 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!"?
odyssey7 7mo ago
Yes, but so too is a modern western framing of these “dice” as “gambling” objects. 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.
- culi 7mo ago
  They found 239 unique sets of dice from 130 tribes across 30 linguistic stocks. Although many of them are "binary lots" there is clear evidence that games of chance are extremely widespread in ancient North America > His final report includes illustrations and descriptions of 293 unique sets of Native American dice from “130 tribes belonging to 30 linguistic stocks,” and it notes that “from no tribe [do dice] appear to have been absent”. In addition, Culin cites and quotes at length 149 ethnographic accounts of how these dice were used to power games of chance and for gambling. Based on this record, Culin suggested that “the wide distribution and range of variations in the dice games points to their high antiquity”. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/article/-/E38C7B1F4CE7F417D8EFAC5AFEEF20A2 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/a...
DaedalusII 7mo ago
yeah man these boys were definitely doing bayesian probability and gaussian distributions to operate their sea shell based barter economy
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]

netcan 7mo ago

Anytime you bring God into it... the concept of truth has the option of getting very abstract. 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.

calf 7mo ago

That has barely to do with my specific point. The researcher in TFA said if they were doing complex counting then blah blah blah. The general insight is that complex counting would force some kind of Bayesian or probabilistic reasoning even one that is informal, intuitive, rudimentary or partly incorrect. Whereas a theory of divining stones usage would have very little actual complex counting involved, maybe they had the tribal equivalent of fortune slips, and so they would not be cognitively challenged to reason about dice. What constitutes complex counting, I don't know, ask the researcher. But IMO it's not out realm of impossibility and time and again we have discovered the old ones of Homo sapiens were more cognitively/intellectually sophisticated than these kinds of scientists assumed earlier. I'm not wedded to this, it would be hard to prove, especially as a hypothesis involving human cognitive constraints/evolution, but I won't dismiss it as completely implausible either. It is an interesting if-then "archaeological cognitive science" argument, that's all.

tech_ken 7mo ago

> 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...) > It's possible different conceptualisations of probability existed elsewhere. Rudimentary sampling theory 100% predates 17th century Europe: https://ckraju.net/wordpress_F/?p=55 https://ckraju.net/wordpress_F/?p=55

culi 7mo ago

From the original work: > In a landmark article, foundational to the field of behavioral economics, Tversky and Kahneman (Reference Tversky and Kahneman1974:1130) argued that humans do not infer the statistical regularities embedded in everyday experience because they “are not coded appropriately”—meaning that the quantitative features inherent in these experiences are not isolated, noted, and organized in ways that reveal probabilistic patterns that are usually obscured by the noise of other incoming experience. Intriguingly, Native American dice games appear to perform such a “coding” function. They produce a simplified stream of random events that are carefully observed and recorded at multiple levels: in the scoring of individual dice throws, in the keeping of cumulative scores in single matches, and in tallying wins and losses in multiple matches over time as recorded by the giving or receiving of goods. Therefore, by observing and recording the patterns appearing in these outcomes, ancient Native American dice players repeatedly presented themselves with the very type of “coded” experiences that Tversky and Kahneman (Reference Tversky and Kahneman1974) argued would allow humans to observe and infer the presence of underlying probabilistic regularities. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/article/-/E38C7B1F4CE7F417D8EFAC5AFEEF20A2 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/a...