Mathematician Dr. James Lindsay Explains How Math Originated

In the beginning, people like you had a rock. The idea of "one" was invented to describe the number of things you had. Then later, you found another rock, and the idea of "two" was invented to describe the situation for when you had one rock and added another rock to your pile. It was realized that the same applies not just to rocks, and numbers were given abstract meaning of their own. Arbitrary symbols, though not arbitrary like "A+A=B" (really, you embarrass yourself) for these numbers were eventually assigned.

A lot of time passed, and a lot of effort was involved in trying to understand how things work, but for a lot of it, like the different "eye combinations" on "dices" it just comes down to counting. If you're careful, you can count 36 ways that any distinct "eye combinations" on (two) "dices" can occur, and you can also count how many of them are a particular "eye combination," e.g. "snake eyes," which can occur in one way only. Baby probability theory hypothesized (propensitist approach) that 1 out of 36 possible outcomes, each equally likely, implies "snake eyes" has a 1/36 chance of happening, and when rolling two "dices" many, many times over, that's what we see (frequentist approach). Eventually the two approaches were connected, but not married.

That you think the dice are following some magical mathematical rules is sheer nonsense. The mathematical rules (counting and proportions, in this case) were invented painstakingly over millennia for people to better describe what they experience. The laws are descriptive, not proscriptive.
Any questions?

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