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Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

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Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#201

Post by DarylZero »

romwell wrote: post #57
d136o wrote: post #39

In this [1] interview by Barry Ritholtz, Markel CEO essentially told the origin story of an insurance giant. Basically a family member was a lawmaker, passed a law that drivers of the newly invented cars (maybe horse buggies?) must be insured. They simultaneously started a company that sold insurance. Over time they learned to make money from investing their customers capital. It blew my mind at how candid he was abo…

Side story about how satisfied people can be with the mandated insurance. I was on coast-to-coast road trip when I got into an accident in TX. Someone was trying to pass me on the left in a turning lane, veered into the incoming lane, and then hit my vehicle's front wheels from the back. The police ticketed the other driver, and told me that insurance will surely take care of that on my side. "Wow, it's worse than we…

> Now, if I had comprehensive coverage, they'd be facing my insurance company — because one of those has to pay up.

You don't need collision coverage to cover collisions that are the fault of other drivers -- just uninsured motorist coverage.

Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#202

Post by aqualinux »

xeRTRex wrote: post #196
Aeolun wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the question in the article the skills you get from this would carry over.

The fundamentals of actuarial science: probability, time-value of money, and tail-risk have absolutely benefited me. I do gripe that much of the material is out-dated. I sat for all my exams within the past 15 years and (for example) we had a lot of option pricing models that have been archaic since the 90's and no machine learning (material has been updated with ML, but it constantly feels a couple decades behind).

The ML skills update was a very basic update. Proper ML skills take a long time to learn and can't be taught through an exam, the material for which gets forgotten very quickly afterwards.

Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#203

Post by boppo1 »

aqualinux wrote: post #172
tzs wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're constrained to legacy industries Is insurance really a legacy industry?

The incumbent insurance companies maintain their position in the market through having large amounts of capital which lets them ultimately offer lower premiums than a new competitor entering the market which may have less capital. This means the legacy insurance companies don't need to prioritise investing in innovation to maintain their position, hence the old companies stay around.

Could this be one of the few cases where a DAO actually has a real world application?

Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#204

Post by bigpookie »

stbtrax wrote: post #3

From experience from a few close friends: Actuarial science is always in the lists of top jobs but it's a terrible career. It's quite limiting and doesn't pay particularly well. The companies are all old and stagnant and the amount of time put in to studying for exams is taxing. It'd be much better ROI to put that time into studying for sw-eng roles. That is, unless you're particularly interested in memorizing math f…

In all honesty the actuarial pay is really quite good. Keep in mind your average FCAS makes about 200k a year at only the 10 year mark which is probably 60 to 70k more than your average SWE. That FCAS will go on to have an average salary of 300 to 500k+ later in their career as well. And these jobs are often obtainable outside super expensive areas where SWEs tend to reside (SF, Seattle, NY, etc), which makes the salary much more attractive.

Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#205

Post by gruez »

SilasX wrote: post #177
gruez wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The claim I was defending was that the way auto liability insurance is done is a scam Seems like it's working as intended? The purpose of auto liability insurance is to... insure the policyholder from liability. If you're not the policyholder, it's not working for you. If you're a policy and you're not experiencing losses stemming from your liability (ie. you crashed your own car), it's not covered. Others in this t…

I thought I addressed exactly that in my original reply It’s not really working if and when once side is incentivized not to pay when they can and are obviously at fault. Your comment is like saying “yeah that corporation used a natural pond as a toxic waste dump, so what? Corporations are supposed to make a profit, right?” Yes, they are … subject to other social desiderata like respecting others’ rights. You seem to…

>It’s not really working if and when once side is incentivized not to pay when they can and are obviously at fault.

This seems to be based on the "making all parties whole" interpretation of insurance, rather than "protect the policyholder". Are you ignoring my prior comment entirely? Are you trying to argue that insurance companies ought to have a "making all parties whole" imperative rather than a "protect the policyholder" imperative? Or perhaps you take issue with insurance companies reneging on their obligations?

It seems like from the rest of your comment that you take issue with the latter, rather than the former. My response to that would be: I agree reneging on obligations in general is bad. However, even you seem to agree that there's some room for dispute, hence why answer was qualified with "obviously at fault". Other commenters have suggested somehow punishing insurance companies in cases where they're "obviously at fault" and refuse to pay up. However, the trouble then becomes, what counts as "obviously at fault"? I have not received a satisfactory answer for that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29720344.

Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#206

Post by pkaye »

lostlogin wrote: post #97
romwell wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side story about how satisfied people can be with the mandated insurance. I was on coast-to-coast road trip when I got into an accident in TX. Someone was trying to pass me on the left in a turning lane, veered into the incoming lane, and then hit my vehicle's front wheels from the back. The police ticketed the other driver, and told me that insurance will surely take care of that on my side. "Wow, it's worse than we…

Is there a ‘small claims’ court process in the US? Here in New Zealand there is a court process that is cheap and fairly efficient for low value claims. This sort of thing would probably sneak into that category.

Yes there is small claims courts in the US but I think cross state lawsuits may not work in all situations. So if you are from California and are suing for an incident that happened in Texas, you would have to go the small claims court in Texas which involved time and money to travel there.

Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#207

Post by starwind »

xeRTRex wrote: post #118

One of the most frustrating aspects of the process is that once outside of insurance/insurance-adjacent industries, the credentials are useless. I have my FSA (fellowship of the SOA) and CERA (chartered enterprise risk analyst) from the SOA. I no longer wanted to work in insurance and left for data science. I felt the need to obtain a graduate degree to feel qualified enough for the data science space. My Master's de…

> The pay isn't as great as it once was

Not to mention there aren't that many entry-level openings so you don't get much choice on where you live after college

Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#209

Post by thaumasiotes »

mb7733 wrote: post #103
romwell wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take: if it's something that's universally a good thing that should be required of every driver, it should be provided by the state and paid for with taxes / annual registration fees. Otherwise, it's just an income-generating scheme for private parties. Oh, and fun fact: the liability insurance isn't required to pay up anything unless the covered driver loses in court . They don't have to follow that the police r…

British Columbia forces you to buy liability insurance from the provincial government and it's awful. The premium calculations are illogical and inefficient. Bad drivers are subsidized by good ones, the rates are among the highest in the country and the govt manages to lose money on it. My experience in other provinces with private insurance companies was much better.

> The premium calculations are illogical and inefficient. Bad drivers are subsidized by good ones

Good drivers subsidizing bad ones is the entire concept of an insurance pool. The corrective mechanism is that if a driver reveals themselves to be bad enough, you make them stop driving.

Re: Want to be an actuary? Odds are, you’ll fail the test

#210

Post by specialist »

nwiswell wrote: post #160
nicoburns wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don’t think corporations have any responsibility to act ethically?

> responsibility to act ethically They have the opposite responsibility, if anything... They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, and considering that the behavior being suggested here would see them quickly run out of business by their less-moral competition, it would probably be a breach of that duty. The solution is to change laws about redress. For example, statutory punitive damages and attorneys' fees i…

> They have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders...

Citation please.

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