4 Playthings of Fortune: Lots, Games of Chance, and Inequality in l’Abbé Prévost

The history of the evaluation of uncertain evidence before the quantification of probability in 1654 is a mass of examples relevant to current debates. They deal with matters that in general are as unquantified now as ever – the degree to which evidence supports theory, the strength and justification of inductive inferences, the weight of testimony, the combination of pieces of uncertain evidence, the price of risk, the philosophical nature of chance, and the problem of acting in case of doubt. Concepts similar to modern “proof beyond reasonable doubt” were developed especially in the legal theory of evidence. Moral theology discussed “probabilism”, the doctrine that one could follow a probable opinion in ethics even if the opposite was more probable. Philosophers understood the difficult problem of induction. Legal discussion of “aleatory contracts” such as insurance and games of chance developed the framework in which the quantification of probability eventually took place.

Download Full-text

On games of chance

Philosophical Essay on Probabilities - Sources in the History of Mathematics and Physical Sciences ◽

10.1007/978-1-4612-4184-3_5 ◽

1995 ◽

pp. 33-34

Author(s):

Andrew I. Dale

Keyword(s):

Games Of Chance

Download Full-text

Games of Chance: Explorations into Our Animal Selves

Handbook of Digital Games and Entertainment Technologies ◽

10.1007/978-981-4560-50-4_17 ◽

2016 ◽

pp. 777-804

Author(s):

Siddharth Ramakrishnan ◽

Victoria Vesna

Keyword(s):

Games Of Chance

Download Full-text

THE DIAGNOSIS DERBY

PEDIATRICS ◽

10.1542/peds.56.2.254 ◽

1975 ◽

Vol 56 (2) ◽

pp. 254-254

Author(s):

J R Coll

Keyword(s):

Mathematical Methods ◽

Random Choice ◽

Games Of Chance ◽

Calculated Probability

Picking a Derby winner and making a diagnosis have much in common. The inspirational punter relies on "having a feeling" or a pin stabbed at a race card. Some doctors use similar methods for diagnosis. They and the punters are overgenerous in remembrance of success; there is always a good excuse for the horse or diagnosis that was left at the start. But the racing form of a horse can be calibrated, and random choice be transmuted to calculated probability. The handicapper, like the doctor, seeks discriminative information to predict the order in which the runners should pass the winning post. Unlike the doctor, the handicapper then proceeds to eliminate discrimination to attempt a dead heat for the field. We are said to be a nation of gamblers, and if mathematical methods can be invoked for games of chance there is no reason why the nation's doctors should not readily apply mathematics to the serious business of the nation's diseases.

Download Full-text

Probabilities and Games of Chance

Chance ◽

10.1007/978-3-540-74417-7_1 ◽

2008 ◽

pp. 1-24

Keyword(s):

Games Of Chance

Download Full-text

Against the Odds

The Race Card ◽

10.18574/nyu/9781479868551.003.0004 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 79-108

Author(s):

Tara Fickle

Keyword(s):

Social Mobility ◽

Asian Americans ◽

Risk Taking ◽

Model Minority ◽

Economic Mobility ◽

Model Minority Myth ◽

Games Of Chance ◽

The Relationship ◽

Narrative Function ◽

The Way

This chapter uses games of chance to illustrate the overlooked kinship between the appeal that hardworking Asian Americans held for white sociologists and the appeal that gambling held for Asian Americans. In other words, the chapter emphasizes again the formal symmetry between the way both parties were using gambling to try to rationalize larger paradoxes in cultural theories of race and economic mobility by reframing immigration and social mobility as a risk-taking opportunity. Gambling served an ideational narrative function that is made clear through its representations in both literary and journalistic fictions of the model minority. The model minority myth was, from that perspective, essentially a racialized version of the gambling narrative, wherein Asian Americans modeled a new way of representing and explaining the relationship between past and future, merit and heredity.

Download Full-text

Jim Crow Organized Crime

Building the Black Metropolis ◽

10.5622/illinois/9780252041426.003.0008 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Will Cooley

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

African American ◽

Drug Trafficking ◽

Illicit Drugs ◽

Jim Crow ◽

Primary Source ◽

Underground Economy ◽

Street Gangs ◽

Historical Evolution ◽

Games Of Chance

This chapter examines the historical evolution of Chicago’s African American underground economy. During the first decades of the twentieth-century games of chance associated with cards and dice were the primary source of gambling revenue in black Chicago. By the early 1930s, this facet of the underground economy had been surpassed by policy, also referred to as “the numbers game.” An important linkage between these two periods was that gambling proprietors funneled some of their profits back into the larger community. Later in the twentieth century, gang-controlled drug trafficking became the primary manifestation of black Chicago’s underground economy. Unlike the earlier period’s relatively violence-free focus on games of chance, the selling of illicit drugs by street gangs turned black Chicago into a battleground.

Download Full-text