They’re selling hate. They need to be ostracized publicly.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Whereas I was thinking that so few candidates would vote for the same write-in that it would be meaningless.
It’s quite easy to get on the ballot for the board if you want to.
If you want to suggest someone to the nominating committee, or nominate someone directly by petition, you can do so by following these instructions:
2022 CAS Elections Kick-Off: Call for Nominations | Casualty Actuarial Society (casact.org)
The form for petitioning is here
Microsoft Word - Petition for Board Position - 2022 (casact.org)
and I noticed that new rules allow a member to email the CAS directly, rather than physically sign a piece of paper.
You only need 63 signatures to get on the ballot (1% of voting members) and I know several people who have attempted to get on the ballot via petition, all of whom succeeded in doing so. I believe some of the WLTC candidates petitioned to get on the ballot. So… there kinda are “write-ins”, you just need to start the process well in advance of the actual election.
You may need to be logged into the CAS website to follow those links. And they aren’t super-easy to find. But I believe any motivated candidate can do so.
Nothing is “super-easy” to find on the CAS website since they revamped it…
That’s certainly true.
I even found the right page, and due to the enormous expanse of white space between some platitudes and the links to actual information, failed to find anything the first time i looked.
The new web site is all about looking pretty, and it’s very obvious that “helps actuaries find useful stuff” was no where on the agenda.
Tell me about it. I am looking for a professionalism speaker for a conference. In the good old days it was easy to find the professionalism committee members, now I don’t see that anywhere, meaning I have to reach out to Mikey in the CAS office and hope he returns my message, which is hardly a guarantee…
Do they at least show the email addresses of CAS staff again? They dropped that with the new website.
Answering my own question:
Office and Staff | Casualty Actuarial Society (casact.org)
Nope.
Once upon time, the office seemed to exist to help the members, and the website supported that with convenient features like easy ways to contact the relevant staff person. Now it’s all hidden away, and unless you maintain your own private address list, it’s really hard to contact, for example, the staff member who is supporting some group you are in.
I hate hate hate the new website. But I think it’s symptomatic of what’s going wrong with the CAS. And it’s why I couldn’t vote for some of the people running for BoD. (DEI is the reason I couldn’t vote for other candidates.)
Doesn’t look like it. They also eliminated the email addresses in the member directory, annoying but understandable since it makes it tougher for marketers to spam CAS members.
Seriously?!!! That’s awful. I guess I’ll have to start using LinkedIn
But it’s also a really bad sign regarding their openness. Yeah, I don’t like WLTC, but I think it’s appropriate that CAS members who care about what’s happening at the CAS are able to contact other CAS members.
Maybe I should re-join the AAA. They seem to still have a directory, but maybe it only contains members?
WTF CAS?
Hmm, where have they moved the member directory to?
Yet another example of the CAS reacting to a threat by shooting itself in the foot, imho.
To be clear, you can contact other members, but you have to send them a message that goes through the CAS website. I learned this a few weeks ago when I wanted to contact a group of actuaries who co-authored a publication. I had to send each of the authors a separate message.
The directory is under COMMUNITY in the top menu bar.
Oh – I hate that community thing. It makes it MUCH harder to work with other members of a committee, because it hides everyone’s email. You mean you can’t get the individual emails anywhere, now?
They really are trying to kill the role of volunteers.
And that’s why I voted for Gleba. And didn’t vote for some of the pro-DEI candidates. Because I think “the CAS is killing everything I liked about it” is an even more serious and urgent problem than its lack of diversity.
Thanks. And yeah, all it does is send a message through the annoying CAS “community” system. Okay, off to LinkedIn, which I have never needed before.