Moreover, we have records from some of these precolonial intellectual traditions in the Americas. The nahua genre of huehuetlatolli is an excellent example in many ways. The selectively preserved bits we have resemble something closer to Confucianism than mathematics, but keep in mind we have a narrow selection from a single genre in a much wider landscape.

In what's now US territory, proto-writing systems (emoji are a modern example of these) existed. There were also intellectual traditions associated with them, particularly among southwestern groups like the Puebloans. Those are relatively closed to academics for a variety of historical reasons and consequently understudied, but we know they existed.

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...)

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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.

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.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-antiquity/a...

Obligatory mantras, like Muslims repeating the takbir.

Second problem: diseases (smallpox is the best known) spread much faster than the Europeans and so most of what we they could see was influenced by large numbers of dead people in the previous generation that wasn't recovered from. It is a lot easier to be peaceful with your neighbors when there are no population pressures (that is everyone can eat enough on the land you have). Likewise it is easier to give away "stuff" when you have a lot of extras from older generations that nobody needs.

Third, guns and horses allowed for ways to life that were not possible before. The great nomadic horse tribes - that was clearly observed, but the way of life depends on things the Europeans brought not long before. It is really hard to know what the culture was like before the horse arrived. There is reason to suspect that those great nomadic tribes where heading to a population collapse of the bison herds because the horse and guns enabled over hunting (but of course Europeans arrived before that could happen, and did their own number on the herds).

I also say "alleged" because in most cases those oppressors are the other half of the family tree for the people we have alive today we're calling some particular outgroup. News organizations like NBC used to treat these topics with more care to avoid "othering" and full awareness that modern subjects are a mixed people with a ton of nuance. This is the USA, for crying out loud.

Now if you really want your "woosh", let's consider the stereotype of native americans owning casinos, and this article is about their ancient dice. :-)

Why do you intentionally try not to understand the point someone makes and then come up with your own negative fantasy about them?