Rayyan Dabbous on Faith in Predictive Scientific Models

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/11/15

Rayyan Dabbous is an author, journalist, and PhD student at the University of Toronto. His recent books include DIY Creative Activism (2019), Psychoanalysis of a Teenage Novelist (2020), and Torontino (2022). He recently edited the anthology George Sand: Philosophical Dialogues. Here he discusses his research on faith in predictive scientific models of human affairs.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, we met at an economics for journalists training seminar or workshop (conference) for several days from November 2nd to 5th of this year, 2023. As happens with any get together like that of talented people, you talk about their research, their work, where they’ve been, what they’ve done. And we met each other, Rayyan. You started talking about being at the University of Toronto a bit. I looked into it. I thought this area of “response to faith in predictive scientific models in human affairs, politically and psychologically” was very interesting. First question, how are you defining “faith”? How does this apply in your generalized research program?

Rayyan Dabbous: Basically, I am looking mainly at the 19th century, and interestingly many researchers say the idea of probability and scientific thinking really kicked off then. So, the kind of thinking we have today and since the 20th century and the rise of very accurate science then, say Einstein and his gang in physics, and elsewhere in the social sciences, economics included. But of course we can also stretch back to the Romans if we want, even the Arab times. The first economist rose, actually, during the Islamic Empire. 

I am focused on the 19th century because it is a very interesting century. At the time, it was becoming secular, but there was this struggle between religion and science. That’s really the climax of the struggle. We know who won in retrospect: science. But there is an argument according to which – and this is not just me, but other people too – the people who won – the 19th century scientist – adopted the ideas of those who lost, i.e. the religious man or the preacher. That’s how probability became fully accepted in the 19th century. In the beginning of the 1800s, thinkers discovered the regularity of numbers – something sensed in the 17th century – and thus how the world works. 

If you had the suicide rates of France and Germany – say 47 people killed themselves over one period – the next year things looked regular. It was the same rate from a macro perspective. This was how, among other things, scientists began to believe in the power of probabilistic thinking. There are probabilities we can use. But at the same time, there were irregularities. People generally noticed they could calculate anything about the future and believed in their scientific models. Even though there were things we couldn’t plan. There was an element of surprise. I am looking at both sides. The two women who I am looking at particular were those who developed a nuanced view of scientific prediction, but, at the same time, knew that there was this idea of uncertainty about the future. Not because your calculations themselves were right or wrong about something. 

Jacobsen: What I am getting from that, it is faith as an orientation of mind and expectation rather than mathematical modeling. 

Dabbous: This is one of the debates. In probability theory, there are two perspectives. Either you got it wrong because, as you said, expectation was wrong, you can go back through the calculation and you can get it right, or it has nothing to do with what you project with the calculation, but has to do with the nature of reality or the nature of probability. The result was not what you thought it was, not because you thought you were wrong, but because there is an element of surprise in reality. By “reality,” I mean human affairs, communications systems. But some thinkers, philosophers and scientists, also believe that’s not just human affairs, but how the universe works. Einstein, in particular, had a clash, even, with this other philosopher, Henri Bergson. In any case, we still sometimes think the universe functions in a deterministic way. But that’s not how it works. There’s always chance. My project is about chance, too. This is where faith comes in. 

Jacobsen: This indeterminacy becomes a fundamental axiom around this idea of faith as a concept. Is that correct? It is fundamental to this concept of faith in predictive models or as a critical thought about predictive models in human affairs. 

Dabbous: To this day, it is not resolved. They stop at that term, “Indeterminacy.” There is something we just can’t figure out. But some people do want to figure out and know why that’s the case. When can we know? When can we not? People are still working on it today. That’s what I’m trying to do as well. Even with our economics seminar, people can criticize the models we looked at, arguing, “but there’s something called chance!” That’s something an economist will not like, because chance can be everywhere. But this is where we need to think and find a compromise and nuance. When should we account for chance? When should we trust our model?” 

Jacobsen: How are scientific models, in terms of predicting human affairs, in politics and psychology useful? At what point do these “predictive models” become more and more subject to indeterminacy? So, the efficacy of them, the usefulness of them, the utility of them, to people who want to make predictions about human behaviours in politics and psychology. What are the limits? What is the boundary?

Dabbous: Great question. Let’s stick to humans but this is also true of all living systems: animals, plants, bacteria, because in living systems we’re generally talking about information processing. Your mind processes information. But also a political system or the people in it process information through media or through hearsay, gossip, and other things. The idea of information processing is key because you could have a deterministic view of information processing. You could say, “If I expose the society to x, y, z, you might end up with a revolution, or another political moment.” Psychologically as well, you could say, “I can expose a person to x, y, and z, you might end up with depression or another kind of neurosis, or something else.”

We can have models about that. Even in economics, we can have a model that says, “There will be a crisis.” But the thing with information, there are a lot of people – and very serious thinkers – who call it a kind of “magical science.” They mean communication science. It has this magical thing about it. If I tell you x, you might take it as y. There may be a million reasons why you took it as y. But we can’t always figure it out. 

I can tell you: “Scott, your parents are threatened by this thing, say this political system. Your children might not be safe. I think you should all leave the country.” You can take my comment in a lot of ways. You can become a guerilla fighter. I might have predicted that you would take my comment the opposite way – that you’d have listened to reason, presumably. But there’s so much there. It is such a complex system. You are such a complex system. This is where, to answer your question: “How can we know where the indeterminacy is?”- you need to know the data set. Sometimes, you can guess. “It is a very complex system. But I have similar complex systems.” Like you can base yourself on the Roman Empire to analyze another empire. Sometimes, the math adds up, but, sometimes, it doesn’t.

I believe in science. I believe you should have models to explain reality. This is why it is about faith. You take a leap of faith. That is why it is important to frame it as that, as well. Some people forget that. They take it as fact, or over-trust it, maybe. But that’s the idea. How much trust can you confer? How much faith? I think it’s fascinating. I think there is a lot you can know: take for example medicine. We can know how vaccines generally work. In some specific cases, we don’t. Like certain side effects. There are also effects that are the opposite of what we intend to do. But at the same time, we are learning more and more that the body can be stable on certain points. Medication generally works. This is faith but it’s also progress. It is important to frame it as that. 

Jacobsen: What are you predicting – ha-ha – from your central question in this doctoral research?

Dabbous: In the humanities, when you combine the humanities with the traditional sciences, you want to have an ambitious goal and a less ambitious goal, especially within a Ph.D. You will be grilled at the end of it. For me, the more realistic one, if you want, is fully exploring two women I am looking at: George Sand and Lou Andreas-Salomé. I am trying to show – this is more the gender part of it – that what we know about chance and probabilities came mostly from men but that these two women also shaped how we understand them. Sand and Salomé had a very prophetic understanding of how society works, how the mind works. Figuring out their perspectives is my more realistic goal. The more ambitious one is to continue to add to the toolkit we have about how information works, how society works – in general. There is not a consensus. We just have models. People say different things. I want to push the things that we know and add to that toolkit. Why can’t we understand or predict x thing about the human body? Why can’t we still fully understand how memory works, as in Alzheimer’s research? There’s a lot to find out. What I am hoping to do is to add to our knowledge about all of that.

Jacobsen: How do you think some of the economics training that we received, which was really principles, basic math, and economic thinking with some experiments, inot either this research of your professional work moving forward as a journalist?

Dabbous: I wrote in my notebook a few things about that, namely: “Economics is quite like George Sand and Lou Andreas-Salomé.” They were considered harsh by society and their lovers – in how they think, what we should do, how we should achieve social good. This connects to economics. Economists, as we heard, can be harsh too, in what they want societies to go through. There is a truth to that, but we have to think critically about it too. Again comes this idea of magic, faith, and hope. Economists are harsh, but they are unwittingly optimistic. The economists that, at least, we looked at, thought markets will work by themselves. It is like the faith of the 19th century and of these two women. Sand and Salomé also thought we have to go through hardship, but they were also activists and believed something else is out there and which we must strive toward.

Equilibrium, economically, is an interesting concept. Many economists think government intervention will prevent equilibrium from happening. That’s also something I look at, whether in psychology or in psychoanalysis. Salomé was a psychoanalyst who worked with Freud. For them, they also wanted to find an equilibrium mentally and thought we as individuals also sabotage that goal. The same way economists view governments as sabotaging their equilibrium! Of course you can say “we need a revolution,” and end up realizing a revolution was counterproductive, causing reactionary movements instead. But that depends on what is counterproductive, in the long-run. And we can’t know that. It is true of psychology and economics. The economists we listened to admitted, “We can’t predict things 100%.” That was great to hear.

Jacobsen: Rayyan, thank you very, very much for the opportunity to meet, learn from one another, and conduct the interview [Laughing] while you’re in the middle of your flight back from Vancouver to Toronto on your doctoral research, it’s been a pleasure in-person and in the interview.

Dabbous: You’re welcome. Thank you. Same, same.

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