alt Hacker News> 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 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.
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Maybe this is because dice were originally made from the bones of animals like sheep, which are inherently irregular.
I don't see the point of being confident about this in either direction. I will not assert for certain but (or, IF) they had dice for 12000 years (12,000!) and to be so certain they didn't know anything at all on an intuitive level is a bit strong a position to take, I don't see that as a safe null/default hypothesis.
I had also said "..., THEN it's not implausible" so I don't love how you quoted a strawman in the first place.
It's not entirely crazy. I believe Thorp described this about roulette wheels. If they had no imperfection at all, it would be computationally laborious but not unthinkable to compute the result from the initial positions and velocities. In order to be unpredictable, roulette wheels need to have imperfections. Those very same imperfections, of course, lead to some statistical regularities.
Edit: It wasn't quite that, but very nearly: start reading paragraph 5 in http://www.edwardothorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Physi...
In the next article in the series, he explains that in practice, roulette wheels are often tilted and that can be used to gain a further advantage: http://www.edwardothorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Physi...