About

I'm an actuary. I spend my working life putting numbers on things that haven't happened yet — how long people will live, what interest rates will do, how much money an insurer should hold back against being wrong.

It is a profession built entirely on the fact that we don't know. That turns out to be reasonable training for other questions, and I've been following them somewhere less quantitative: I'm training as a psychotherapist.

This site is where the two meet. What it means to hold a belief you know is incomplete. Why definitions serve some purposes and quietly exclude others. What professional judgement actually consists of when the model runs out. Some of it is about insurance. Most of it isn't.

I also write about faith and doubt, from inside an unresolved argument rather than from either side of it. I was raised Muslim, I've spent years reading the case for and the case against, and I haven't finished. I'm not writing to persuade anyone of anything.

Essays go out roughly every fortnight.

You can reach me at hello@mujsyed.com.