Maybe some, there are also people who cheer for the capacity of humanity to figure out solutions that can benefits humanity. I view the perspective you describe as people externalizing their own insecurity. I do not view it as a critic towards people who have an excess of stored potential energy, but merely a signal that they haven't made peace with their own internal feelings about themselves. They need love, acceptance. They are on their own journey, everyone has the capacity to grow. Let's help everyone.
For anyone who thinks about doing these, here are a few tips for the advanced CAS exams.
- Time is your enemy.
- Use memorization techniques, like a memory palace.
- Grader are looking for key words, be succinct.
- If you do not know, skip. Your brain will figure it out while you work other questions.
- Create your own study material from the syllabus. Anything that is remotely mathematical will be tested at some point.
- Practice being efficient with the tool used to take the exam. Pen or keyboard.
Hated/Loved doing the exams to get my FCAS. It allowed me to explore my mental capacity. It teaches you how to learn fast, how to memorize, how to be quick at solving problems.
It has been a while, but after getting involved with the exam question writing/grading part, I felt the CAS was too entrenched in their processes. I stopped paying my dues since I did not plan to sign any acturial statement anyway.
I now do data engineering for other actuaries and maintain our tech stack. Think rating engine and ML in production. Code is mostly on github now, we have peer reviews, deploy to kubernetes. It is really is no different than SWE, except we know a lot more about the business side.
R has data.table. It is the game changer as I agree base R data.frame do not cut it for performance. tibble will come close once they incorporate more of the data.table performance tricks.
RStudio is an absolute killer solution from the get go.
Package management in R is simple and robust.
Shiny is the new Excel pivot table on performance enhancing code.
Python has more contributors, more users. It also creates a lot more noise. Business people may feel like it is a a programmer tool. R feel more approachable.
In the end, both are great solutions but we decided on R because we believe in the people contributing to the ecosystem, mostly RStudio. Somewhere down the line, there might be a transition to julia.
I'm pushing for our actuarial team to transition to more R + Git. After 3 years of preaching, most of the actuaries now use RStudio + git as their primary work tool. It is happening.
What we did :
1) Provide documentation on everything from install to using internal R libraries for ETL.
2) Provide mostly problem free, always updated VMs with RStudio Server/ Shiny Server.
3) Establish an hotline channel for instant help on R or git.
4) A couple members on the team developed really close working relationship with IT and we have great respect for each other work.
What we provide is way better and by being active, we built users trust in the tools.
We are phasing out SAS and proprietary modeling tools. Python never took hold even if we bought Anaconda entreprise. Excel is there to stay for sure but since actuarial student learn R in school, it is easier to onboard new hire.
If you want to go down this path and have a chat, hit me up. I'm in P&C. We use R both in development and production environments. We use it for pricing, spatial contractual obligation, claims assignment and a couple more models.
A plumber in front of your ML serving function running in a docker container. There, simple, fast enough. We have multiple R containers in production, it is working fine and the data scientist are happy that they can keep working in RStudio.
Probably because I believe you should wear whatever makes you comfortable within the context of the event you are attending. Women could be wearing suits, and men dresses or skirts, I don't think that matters. And if and it was just down to my personal opinion, it would be wear whatever you want that makes you happy.
I understand some groups have expectation about people dressing nice and if I'm attending, I will conform.
But my point was that everyone had a dress code imposed upon them and that it could have been handled maybe a little better. Just tell people to dress up I guess, no need to specify which sexes gets to wear what.
It is interesting to see this discussion about notebooks while I'm thinking about all the RStudio users who do all their work inside the IDE and are pretty happy. Notebooks seem like such an inferior tool to me. I'm also extremely bias.
This comment has to be the most insightful I have ever read. It is true on so many levels and captures perfectly the mentality that some senior decision makers have about AI.