Reddit reply in r/AcademicQuran: some presumptions of historicalcritical — February 18, 2025 · mdgbvcy | Ali Shukri Amin

> "This response fundamentally misunderstands uniformitarianism (in history) which says nothing about history being predictable or lacking extreme events. OP’s quotation of Sinai is clear about what it means in this context: that ‘the moral and intellectual abilities of human agents in the past were not radically different from ours, and that the behaviour of past agents, like that of contemporary ones, is at least partly explicable by recourse to certain social and economic factors.’"

You're assuming: because human cognitive abilities haven’t changed much, historical behavior is fundamentally similar across time.

Problem: historical events are not just driven by individual cognition; they are shaped by radically different social structures, technologies, and external pressures that change how people behave. We cannot reliable predict what will happen when there are only three bodies in a physical system despite having perfect theoretical descriptions of their individual movement. Humans are far more complex and we're talking about open systems. Assuming human nature stays the same does not justify assuming historical behavior follows modern analogies.

Even if we accept that human intellectual capacities are stable over time, that does not mean past societies functioned under the same incentives or constraints as today. It also doesn't mean we have solid models to predict current human behavior. The rise and fall of civilizations, the spread of ideologies, and the role of institutions make history highly contingent on non-recurring conditions. Treating history as if it follows predictable patterns based on modern experience ignores the influence of rare, transformative events.

> "Sure, some things work without us knowing why, what does that have to do with whether or not the predictive success of a scientific theory is related to it being true?"

A model's success in making predictions does not mean it captures reality. I don't see how you haven't grasped this yet. It only evinces that it functions within a specific range. Scientific paradigms frequently shift when new variables are introduced, meaning that what "works" today might be fundamentally flawed or incomplete tomorrow. Predictive success is a weak proxy for truth if we cannot guarantee its stability across unknown conditions.

What is even worse is history. History lacks the experimental verification that allows us to adjust theories when they fail, making reliance on predictive success even more fragile. Perhaps we could model experiments in the future but we can't control variables. Theorizing about the past is even more fraught.

Just as Newtonian physics was successful until relativity exposed its limits, a historical model that "seems to work" does not confirm that it is the correct way to understand the past. The inability to test counterfactuals makes historical inference even less reliable than scientific prediction.

Your regular invocation of probability or likelihood in this domain is not only incorrect it is pseudoscientific. I don't understand why you can't account for lack of knowledge in this field of study or have some epistemic humility (which it seems Sinai was trying to do in this quote).

> "Quantitative financial models are not scientific theories and they are also not predictively successful."

What? Some quantitative models ARE predictively successful? Have you ever heard of quant funds?

Financial models are built using the same statistical and mathematical frameworks used in many sciences. Especially physics. Yet they consistently fail in unpredictable environments. Their inability to account for extreme, fat-tailed events demonstrates the problem of assuming that past stability predicts future behavior. If even rigorously tested financial models collapse under real-world volatility, why should we assume historical models based on uniformitarianism fare any better?

The 2008 financial crisis exposed how models that appeared successful over long periods failed catastrophically when rare events occurred. History is even more vulnerable to this problem since it is dominated by singular events rather than repeatable patterns. Just because a model works under normal conditions does not mean it reflects a deeper truth about the system it describes.

> "This is not a problem lol I'm sorry. This is dismissing the concept out of hand, although you have one more thing to say about it."

You are treating consilience as inherently reliable when it is only as good as the independence of the fields converging. It's like you can't grasp the idea of layers of assumptions underneath a science.

If multiple disciplines share the same flawed assumptions or methodologies, their agreement is meaningless. Consensus among experts does not prove correctness if they are all operating under the same bias.

The historical examples of phrenology, eugenics, and rational-actor economics demonstrate that entire fields can reach incorrect conclusions when they rely on shared but faulty premises. Agreement does not equal truth if the underlying framework is flawed. Without independent validation, consilience can easily reinforce error rather than correct it.

> "Consilience is about independent convergence. That is stated in the first sentence of the Wikipedia page about it. None of the analogies you list involve independent convergence."

You are assuming that disciplines converge independently when, in reality, many academic fields influence each other and share foundational assumptions.

Obvious example: If historians, anthropologists, and sociologists all base their conclusions on uniformitarian assumptions, their agreement does not validate uniformitarianism. All this does is reflect their shared starting point. Its circular.

True independence means different methodologies leading to the same conclusion, not different disciplines using the same method.

If Islamic scholars from different traditions agree on a theological interpretation, their agreement does not mean it is objectively true. It means they share a framework that produces the same result. The same applies to historical methodologies that all assume uniformitarianism and then "confirm" it through their own analysis. Independent validation requires different assumptions producing the same conclusions, not shared assumptions reinforcing each other.