2022 CAS Elections

Forget which candidate but i think one of them mentioned in the semi viral LinkedIn post (which was telling people not to vote for the WLTC-endorsed candidates) saying who the WLTC had endorsed, and perhaps (I forget) who else they were voting for themself. It was nothing that i thought seemed egregious at the time.

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Yeah, that really sounds like a nothingburger that was blown out of proportion.

If you aren’t on LinkedIn, you are missing out on some terrific trolling by the affinity groups:

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Just voted - somehow the skypunch link ended up in my spam folder so was tough to find.

Moderating:

I would just like to remind posters, and especially our new contributor, @Wltc4CAS , or some of the rules of this forum

In particular, posts that imply that trans women are men, or that trans men are women, and posts that intentionally or persistently misgender people are not allowed on this site. Such posts will be deleted, and posters who make those posts may be booted from threads, restricted from discussing gender, or banned from the site.

Racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry are also forbidden on this site.

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but FYI, this board is not the CAS, and the owners of this board have chosen to take a stand on those matters. And as a guest of a privately owned message board, I wanted you to understand the choices of the owners of this board.

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18 posts were split to a new topic: Redlining and the Casualty Insurance Industry

Closing this topic while mods, Serena and I discuss this thread and the existence of wlc on this forum.

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At the request of the owners, I have banned WLTC and deleted their posts. I also deleted most of the replies, but left a couple of substantive replies and refutations. Moderators may make further deletions after additional discussion.

Re-opening the topic to everyone else as the election is still active.

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I understand the stance taken by mods as this is a privately owned board, but does nobody else think that refusing to engage at all in discussion/debate is part of the reason that they created their platform? I want to be clear that I do not share their views, but from what I had seen so far, nothing they said was in bad faith or malicious before they were banned, why not have discussion and then choose to ban based upon whether or not they were acting maliciously/in bad faith? Back to my first point, I think that labeling them racist and banning them without first engaging in discussion is exactly what led to the groups existence and just drives the wedge further. Is it not healthy to have discussion, particularly when there’s heaps of papers/literature surrounding discrimination in insurance pricing that can be cited?

  1. I’m not going to pander to bullshit under the guise of free speech.
  2. when we started this forum I had two conditions. One, I’m not having this kind of stuff on my servers and two, I’m not doing it for free. So the second one was a lie.
  3. how rich is it to question open discussion from people with a locked down website.

They’re selling hate. They need to be ostracized publicly.

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There is something called the tolerance paradox that applies especially to online forums. It is that if you tolerate hate in any form, then eventually it’s all you’ll have, so you have to squash hate as soon as it peaks it’s head up, and you have to do it forcefully, or you will be trying to pull weeds forever.

There is absolutely no discussion to be had about gender identity or race. Human beings have the right to exist, and they favor driving me out of the profession and out of society altogether. While they’ve learned to moderate their speech to make it seem reasonable, anyone that saw their initial postings or emails know that they are a hate group and that they are using the age old tactic of sounding reasonable to pull centrists in to their hate.

They aren’t about transparency. They aren’t about free speech. They are about keeping the actuarial profession for straight white males only, and if we don’t eliminate their influence now, then we’ll being fighting this battle for decades, and potentially watching the CAS become an instrument of oppression.

Edit: I also don’t understand how arguing redlining/racial discrimination didn’t exist in insurance and other financial sectors isn’t bad faith. Its existence is demonstrably true, and people making that argument should be dealt with as swiftly and the same way as you would deal with Holocaust-deniers, COVID deniers, or 9/11-deniers.

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That’s kind of what I was trying to say, though less eloquently.

I will point out that we have had this discussion on the forum (privately) and my response was that open discussion is fine.

but theres a world of difference between community members here having a discussion that’s heated and raising valid points around these issues, and someone cloaking their hatred with talking points. The first has been mostly allowed, though nuanced. The second, not a chance.

The cas has a cancer growing right now under the guise of these people. My interest extends only to this forum, but the cas community should not be standing idly while this goes on.i appreciate that there are limits to what a credentialed actuary can say, but people need to call these people out and condemn them publicly. They’re a blight on the stellar reputation of the actuarial profession.

Anyway sorry to derail the conversation.

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Okay, I removed the redlining material, and I will move it to it’s own thread in a couple of minutes. I left the election material here, as well as a little discussion about the banning of a poster. If other mods want to re-rganize further, go at it.

Here’s the redlining material

I really wrestled with the election this year, and ended up only voting for 3 candidates, John Gleba, Amber Rohde, and Julie Lederer.

While John’s comments about the DEI initiative make me slightly anxious, I believe he does support a strong DEI initiative, and is more concerned about how it was announced and rolled out than with the underlying details. And as a CAS volunteer, I share his concerns about the board losing touch with the membership – the new staff/volunteer model and a complete overhaul of E&E were both implemented with extremely little input from members, not to mention the out-of-the-blue decision to merge with the SoA. Also, I’ve worked with him on volunteer committees, and found him principled and hard-working.

Amber Rohde seems like a strong DEI advocate, and she seems reasonable in general. As I said above, I found myself nodding in agreement to her answers to the questions.

Julie Lederer is a regulator, and I think it’s good to have a regulatory voice on the CAS board. Her candidate statement impressed me, she wasn’t endorsed by WLTC, and I think she is an advocate of openness, which I think the CAS badly needs right now.

For every other candidate, I had issues I just couldn’t overcome to the point of feeling comfortable voting for them. In same cases my issues had to do with DEI, and in others they had to do with CAS governance. I feel like I wimped out in not choosing among the other five, but I was afraid that I’d loose track and forget to vote altogether. So I cast my ballot.

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It would be nice if there were write in candidates…

I could see potential for abuse with write-in candidates, especially when a large percentage of the membership doesn’t vote, and how many of the voters do a thorough review of the information based on the candidates?