 Hi everyone, it's MJ, the fellow actor, and welcome to the very first philosophy vlog. We're gonna try and do one of these every single month. And the idea is, yeah, as it says in the title, philosophy vlog, chat about this amazing subject, which I really, really wish was more embedded in the actuarial syllabus, because you start to realize that there are issues or discrepancies between activities when it comes to models, when it comes to having a final output. And sometimes it comes down to to the various assumptions that we're using. If you use different assumptions, then you can use the exact same maths, the exact same data, and you're going to get a very, very different output, which could lead to the exact opposite conclusion. And I spoke a little bit about that in the actuarial vlog regarding the covid models. I'm not going to get too much into that because, yeah, we've also got an actuarial vlog every month, as well as a karting vlog. Because, you know, why not? So this one, I want to focus more on philosophy. And I must say one, or not one, I guess two philosophers at the moment that have really started to interest me. And I guess they lean into this whole idea of having the same data, the same thought, but different assumptions, and they led to completely different results that would end up shaping our world. So the two philosophers are Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Both of them wrote a book called Confessions, in which case both of them, as children, end up stealing a fruit. So with Augustine, it's a pear, with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it's an asparagus. So both of them, as children, steal something. They write about it in this book called Confessions. They both acknowledge that the deed itself was wrong, but they come to two very, very different conclusions because of the assumptions that they had prior. And if philosophy is a bit of a weird one, because it's almost like they're using their conclusions to justify their assumptions, and their assumptions would have such a big impact on our reality. So I thought, why not in the very first philosophy vlog, let's talk about these two philosophers, what were the assumptions that they had, and what have been the ramifications in our reality because of it. And as actuaries, how do we learn from this and understand, wow, our assumptions are critical to our decision-making process. So let's start off with Augustine. And it's interesting because he actually debated his assumption with this other guy at the same time. So Augustine is like what around the fourth century AD, Rome has kind of just been sacked. Augustine is from a town called Hippo or from North Africa. And he actually debates this other guy called Peg, I don't know, something with a P. But the fact that I don't even remember him, and if he even said his name, most of you would be like, who the hell is that? Indicates who won the debate, because that guy would go on to be labeled as a heretic. And Augustine, of course, would become Saint Augustine and would become one of the founding members or the founding fathers, as they like to be called, of the Catholic Church, which, as we know, would go on to be and still is to this very day, one of the biggest institutions. So what was the assumption that Augustine had and why was it the exact opposite of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who would come, you know, a thousand and something years later. So Augustine's view was this idea of original sin. And we're going to put that assumption of original sin versus Jean-Jacques Rousseau's the noble savage. And essentially, it comes down to this idea of when you're born, are you good or are you bad? And of course, maybe in a later month, we'll address Nietzsche, who's got that famous book, Beyond Good and Evil, and tries to tell us that, hey, let's go away with these concepts completely. And nihilism, which is different from Nietzsche, kind of has a little bit of a same idea. And it's almost like today's popular philosophy, you know, good and evil, they're like, oh, these are just social constructs. And there definitely is that thought pattern. But before, I couldn't even say the 20th century, good and evil were some very, very big concepts taken very, very seriously. And what philosophers were wrestling with was when we're born, are we good? And then do we come back? Or are we born bad? And we can try and become good. Augustine puts forward this idea that we are born bad. All of us are bad at birth. Very scary idea, especially if, you know, with infant mortality, that's quite high. It's like, oh my gosh, does that mean, you know, all the babies are bad? And Augustine being part of, you know, the Catholic Christianity, it was like, oh, what happens to all of these babies if their souls are tainted at birth? And that's one of the reasons why you had infant baptism in the Catholic church. Because of high infant mortality, a lot of children were dying, parents were very concerned with the soul of the babies. So they're like, okay, don't worry, we'll quickly baptize it. It's like, get out of the womb, get baptized, and then hopefully, you know, you're on the path towards goodness, because this is where it gets very interesting. And like I say, it becomes like as an opposite conclusion, because Augustine's conclusion would be that institutions and society makes us from bad to good. So in Augustine's view, it's we're born bad. Then he has this idea, like I say, original sin, which we inherited from from Adam, after the fall from Paradise, where he and Eve consumed the forbidden fruit. Just a little fun fact on that, like I was reading the other day that they say an art is depicted as an apple, because they're playing on the pun of the word apple. Forgive my pronunciations. It's it's malas or something like that, which sounds very similar in Latin to to malice, or you know, we get the word malice, which means bad. And the fact that this fruit was forbidden. So they say in arts, they were playing on the pun of the Latin word. And that's why an artist depicted as as an apple. But it's interesting how yeah, Adam and Eve ate their apple. Augustine ate his pear and we'll see Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I don't know if he ate the asparagus or if you just stole it. I think he stole them and didn't he gave it to a friend. I don't know. But coming back to the whole thing is Augustine's view is that because of Adam, because of the fall of Paradise, because of all of these things, man is inherently evil. We're tainted with the sin of our ancestors. And so we're all born bad. But he says it's up to society and the institutions within society, such as the church, that people and man can get redemption. They can be saved through the church. They can become good people. And this is why Augustine says he says, listen here, I he writes this book Confessions. He's like, and look, look at my own life. Look at the empirical evidence from my own life. When I was younger, I did all of these horrible deeds. I did, you know, I stole and he talks about how he stole the pears and he didn't mean he wasn't even hungry. You know, he says him and his friends just went there. They knew the pears didn't belong to them. They knew they had pears back at home. They weren't even hungry. But they thought, you know, it will just be fun to smash the fruit, throw it around, do all that kind of stuff. Augustine also has that famous, famous quote that says, he says, Lord, make me chaste, but not yet. And it's this whole idea of him realizing that, you know, he definitely had a, as Jung would say it, a shadow. He had a shadow. He was, there was a dark side to, to Augustine. And for him, he found that he could find redemption through Christianity, through the teachings of Christ. And he was like, wow, you know, this stuff is so powerful. I've been redeemed, you know, let's work with the Catholic church, let's institutionalize this and help, you know, the masses who are all born evil in his eyes, go through the Catholic church, go through the institutions of society, whether it's government, schools, education, all of these good things will take a bad person at youth and make them a good person when they're older and in age. And that was Augustine's idea, very, very powerful. He became a saint. The Catholic church took on tremendous amount of power. And people believed that order was good. You know, it was good to have a monarch, you know, there was the divine right of kings. And you know, having a king tell us what to do was good because institutions saved us. And this whole philosophy kind of took a lot of this, you know, went into the whole of medieval Europe, and it was like, born bad, institutions save us, that's how we become good. Powerful, powerful idea. And what I love about Saint Augustine, when you go into these like Wikipedia page, you know, it's like, who, who influenced him? And you know, you get like Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, you know, the usuals. And it's like, who did Augustine influence? And it's like, the whole of Western philosophy. And I'm just like, well, that's, that's quite cool. Like not just oh, you influence, you know, the Emmanuel Kant and, and, you know, Thomas Aquinas and whoever is like, no, everyone was influenced by Augustine. And that's why I really, really do think Jean-Jacques Rousseau, when he called his book Confession, he was thinking of Augustine, even though I don't think he directly references Augustine. But I think his story is so similar, if there's so many parallels. And of course, what we're going to look with with Rousseau is his assumption is completely different. And of course, his output is completely different as, as well. So Augustine, so Jean-Jacques Rousseau had this idea of the noble savage. Now, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he's an interesting character. Because from what I've read, or like it seems that everyone's general opinion of this guy wasn't, he's not like the smartest of all the philosophers. Like everyone's like, wow, Nietzsche, absolute genius, you know, ends up going crazy. But when he was in his prime, you know, a force to be reckoned with like, or Emmanuel Kant, like, like, oh, IQ of a million. And people like really, really like speak up the intellect of all these other philosophers, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau, not, not so much. In fact, some people almost refer to him a little bit as, as a troublemaker. And I guess if, if Augustine is an agent of order and shows that order makes us good, Jean-Jacques Rousseau comes in with almost the complete opposite. He's a bit of an agent of chaos. And he shows that we have to break things and destroy in order to be good. So Jean-Jacques Rousseau's idea is this thing called the noble savage, that he says, man is good. Man is born good. Man is born pure. And he just like Augustine also references religious texts. He says we're made in the image of God, and God is good. So if we're made in the image of God, then at birth, we must be good. But Jean-Jacques Rousseau, like I say, stole the asparagus, realizes in his own life that he's done horrible deeds was also, I think he was also a bit of a womanizer as, as well. So he also realizes that even in his own life, he's been a bit of a bad wayward person. So how does he explain this if we're all born good? What he does is he says society and institutions have corrupted us. So just where Augustine societies and institutions save and redeem us, Rousseau is going to come with the exact opposite and say society and institutions have corrupted us. And of course, this would cause a lot of stir. Say for example, the French Revolution, which is weird because Rousseau was not French. He was, I think he might have spoken French, but he was born in Geneva. So he was, he was Swiss. So he's a Swiss guy, but because he's so much connected with the French Revolution, a lot of people do think that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is, is a Frenchman. But yeah, when you come up with this idea that society and institutions corrupt us and you feed this idea to the masses, suddenly the divine rights of kings, the church and all these other societies are now under threat because people are saying, what? Because let's admit Jean-Jacques Rousseau has got a much more attractive philosophy. Do you want to be told that, hey, you're born bad and you need to be saved? Or is it much better to believe that, hey, you were born good, but you were corrupted. And that's why you're doing bad. And it's like the second one, well, the first one's got a bit of a desperation. There's a lot of guilt. There's a lot of, oh my gosh, please, can I be saved? I'm so desperate for society where the other one is saying, wait, I'm a victim. You know, there's, there's a little bit of rage. There's a, there's a need for justice. And this would, you know, partly, you know, be the philosophical wave that would impact the French Revolution, where what did they do in the French Revolution is they went in and they cleaned out these institutions. Now, of course, it's important to note that the institutions themselves, there was a lot wrong or, yeah, they weren't the most perfect institutions, especially if we looked at, at, at France at that time. And, you know, this is the 18th, 18th century, because what had happened or I guess a nice way to think about this, and I'm jumping all around on these, on these vlogs, the difference when you write philosophy and when you just speak philosophy. So the one idea I like to think about is to think of water. So the perfect situation with water is when there's, you have a controlled flow of water, where you have a perfect balance of order and chaos. If your water is too chaotic, like a waterfall or, you know, a tsunami or something crazy like that, it's pure destruction, you're going to get drowned. But if your water has got no motion in it, has no chaos at all, it's completely ordered, then it becomes stale, it becomes swamps and, you know, mosquitoes start to breed there and that water becomes poisonous to drink. And I think this is what happens in, in our world is when Augustine was, was writing and doing all of his work, the world was very chaotic. I mean, Rome had just been sacked. You know, this, this huge empire had just taken a really big blow. And the world that Augustine grew up was chaotic and it desperately needed order. The world that Jean-Jacques Rousseau found himself in was the exact opposite. What he found himself in was a situation where, let's admit the French kings were fat. And I'm not just talking about it from a, from a body point of view, they were excessively wealthy. You know, they were just excessive gluttons in all areas of life. The French church had also become unfortunately corrupted in the sense that what happened in, in French culture was that if you worked or tried to detrade or were a bit of a merchant and you're part of like the noble class, you would lose that status because it was kind of seen as beneath the noblemen to partake in such, you know, commercial activities. But the noblemen did need some source of finances in order to do it. But it was, I guess, a clever system because it was like in order to be a noblemen, you don't, you mustn't work. And if you have to work in order to get money, then hey, you're not a noblemen because you're not wealthy enough. So I think that was the intention. The problem is that there were two exceptions. Okay, if you became a military person, or if you became part of the clergy, then you could still get paid and maintain your nobility. The problem with this is that what would you rather want to do? Would you want to go into a war and get blasted by, by cannons and, you know, craziness? Or would you like to join the church where, you know, it's a lot more, it's a lot more of a safer, safer job than being a general in the army. The problem with this though is the nobility still had power. They still had influence. They were able to pull strings. And you had a lot of circumstances where nobilities or noble families would put their children in positions that they should not have been placed in. For instance, you had cases where an 18 year old was made the bishop of an area of France. Now, you've got an 18 year old who's not religious or it's not like, oh, he had a calling from God to go and lead the people and become, you know, a servant of the religion. It's like, no, he was put in here because of mommy and daddy. And, you know, it's basically he's here for the paycheck. But you've got an 18 year old now in charge of, you know, a whole group of nuns. And you can just do the math to see that this probably isn't going to end well. And there were certain things also with Catholicism at the time where you could charge people to pray for people that were in purgatory or, you know, what's the word? It's segmenting. I don't know. There's a fancy word for it basically where people could pay a priest to take away their sins. Which, yeah, a lot of the Christians that, I mean, it was part of the Protestants and the Reformation was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, Jesus died for our sins. You know, his blood is the only thing that can wash us away. And that is completely free for all to partake in. What is this priest in charging cash? But some of the times they had to pay, priests had to pay to get into these positions. And then they needed to, you know, there's another source of income. So it's kind of like I paid for this role so that I can extract money from the people and was kind of seen as a service. And I think it was popular because I guess this is maybe some of the thing people have with Christianity is that it's almost too easy. You know, if you just say, Lord, forgive me, you've just done something absolutely, outrageously bad. And now you're just like, Lord, forgive me. Psychologically, you feel like you haven't been redeemed. You feel like you haven't done enough where at least if you're paying a priest or you're doing a confession or you're doing some sort of task, then at least it feels like you've done some sort of retribution. And psychologically, it can be a lot easier to to accept. And I think this is why, you know, this practice, you know, was so popular. And I always like to do that. I don't like to say, Oh, the church was so evil because they charged people for something that they should not have charged for. If that was the case, no one would have bought it. You know, and you can say, Oh, you know, but the Bible was written in Latin and only certain people could read Latin. It's like, no, you know, we're got around on the basic idea of Christianity. And very basic idea is that the salvation is free. I think, like I say, it's a lot easier for a sinner to pay for their forgiveness than to simply ask for it. If you look at it from from that psychological point of view, it's almost like we want to form a part, have a punishment, the heavier the punishment, because that can actually relieve a lot of the guilt that we that we feel. Anyway, coming back to to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So interesting that they are in two completely different, different environments, Augustine, a lot of order, sorry, a lot of a lot of chaos with the sacking of Rome. And so needs order needs leadership needs an institution needs a church to come in and pay if the way for redemption, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau finds himself in a Europe where the exact opposite is the church has been too successful. It's now become stale. The order is suffocating people. And Jean-Jacques Rousseau comes out with this crazy idea that we are noble savages that in the past, we were better. And it is the society that has corrupted and turned us evil. And if we are to ever become good, we need to tear down these structures. French Revolution, the divine rights of kings was challenged. Rousseau, an early promoter of democracy, you know, power to the people comes in with these ideas. And there's something that we're still seeing to this day, you know, movements like defund the police. It's seen as, hey, this police institution, this, you know, force of order is bad. And we don't need police because it's society that has made us evil to begin with. So let's break this thing down. And hey, because we're all good at heart. Because Jean-Jacques Rousseau's whole idea was he said, I stole those asparagus, because I got pressured by my friends to do so. I got pressured by my friends and who are my friends? My friends are members of society and society has corrupted all of us into doing these horrible, horrible deeds. Of course, like I said, I think Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the smartest of the philosophers because that very, very early story of Adam and Eve points to the exact opposite of the noble savage. You know, if Adam and Eve were noble savages, then why did they go and break God's commandment? He's won an early order. Imagine having like, hey, you can play any PlayStation game you want, any game at all, except for that one game. And then you've got millions of games to play, but you're just like, oh, I'm going to go play that one forbidden game. It's like the game in of itself might not have been evil, but it was the fact that you broke an order at instruction from an authority that is the crime. So it wasn't the deed itself. It was the relationship with an authority that was deconstructed that can be perceived as the evil. And Rousseau would not have been able to say, well, you know, this, the story of Adam and Eve, which kind of is embedded in so many people's, you know, it's almost like the founding stone in all of our unconsciousness. And it's crazy when you look at, you know, the mythology of other areas of other religions of all these things, they all have a very similar story of, of the fall. I mean, even here in Africa, there's that story where it's like, you know, don't eat this thing and then they eat it and then they get kicked out and like it's, it's very, it's a very similar motive that we do kind of, kind of see play out that Rousseau's noble savage completely ignores. But like I say, it's a very attractive one because one is then like, oh, okay, all the babies that died, they're all gone to heaven. Yay. You know, it's a nice thought that that's a nice thought compared to Augustine's thought, which is a lot more, yeah, a lot more chiming. So this is where Rousseau became very, very popular with the people and was able to lead these things. They say it would also, you know, the American Revolution. And some even say, you know, Karl Marx was inspired by Rousseau. And, you know, we all know how, how that led and, and the craziness from these type of, of revolutions. But, and I want to maybe start, you know, start unwinding and landing this plane, because the idea is for these, these vlogs to be of, you know, 30 minutes in length, doing it, like I say, once, once a month. So how can we wrap all of this up and in the next four minutes or so? I think it's this idea that as actuaries, we need to realize that, yes, we've all learned the same maths. Okay, we've all learned the same maths. We've all might be accessing the same data. But our assumptions might differ. And in a general sense, you've got your implicit assumptions and your explicit assumptions, explicit assumptions. Those are the easy ones. Because, you know, they say, I assume interest rate is this or I assume, you know, interest rates are not going to be stochastic, or you make those, you know, explicit. But there's also a lot of implicit assumptions where sometimes the actuary is unaware that they are actually assuming that. And it's only when challenged when going through the work with a peer review with another actuary that they realize, oh, not everybody thinks in the same way. And that might be something that we talk about for the month of February. And the next vlog is these frameworks of reality that each and each of us basically holds. We all have our own frameworks of reality. And they can be different because these frameworks are simplified versions. And by simplifying, you're taking a more lower resolution, you're distorting it. And if somebody distorts it slightly differently, or they, you know, simplify certain areas more than you, you are going to get to different assumptions and different, you know, results. It's also important to factor in why do these people come up with the different assumptions? Why? And it is because of the idea that Augustine and Rousseau grew up in two very, very different worlds. Augustine's world was chaotic. Rousseau's world was too orderly. And we live now in this age of the internet where actuaries were all kind of connected. And it's important to maybe get the views of actuaries from other nations. You know, so, hey, what do the actuaries in India say about this? What do the actuaries in South Africa say about this? What are the actuaries in the UK, in America, Canada, and so on? I mean, there's a reason why when you go into the fellowship level, the fellowship level is a regional exam, because they understand that, hey, the financial conditions that we're living in in South Africa is very different to the financial conditions that they say living in in America. So for instance, South Africa, you know, interest rates are normally a lot higher than the Americans. Inflation is something that we just live with. We've become normalized too. And so with America freaking out like, oh my gosh, this is think what inflation, you know, it's like, yeah, you know, join join the club. And how that ramification goes throughout the rest of the economy makes us maybe in South Africa favor inflation hedged assets, such as property, where let's say in Europe, you know, maybe owning your own property might be seen as as the ideal investment and these kind of things. So it's important to understand how our environment impacts our assumptions, which impacts our outputs, which can then impact our decision making. And that's why it is so good for us as actuaries to not only communicate, but to have an awareness that, hey, not everybody thinks the same way that I do, even if we all learned actuarial science, and we all did mathematical statistics, we all did economics, we all did finance, you know, we all learned the formulas for the time value of money and all those type of things. We might have underlying, you know, implicit assumptions because of the frameworks of our reality due to the environments that we've grown up in. And I think we're just coming up to 30 minutes now. So I think let's maybe end off with that. And if you've got any thoughts, questions, please feel free to add them in the comment section below. And I'll do my best to read them and incorporate them in next month's vlog. Also make sure you check out the Karting vlog and the Actuarial Career one. Although the Actuarial Career one, I don't know, I'm not too happy about that one. I think I jump around a lot. And there's also like, I'm talking like, actually, I want to talk about this whole thing, but it's still too soon. We'll have to come back later because it's it's still too sensitive to whatever working conditions I'm in at the moment. Or at least with philosophy, we can be a lot more, a lot more free. But with that said, we are ending the vlog in three, two, one. Thanks for watching, everyone.