 Hi everyone it's MJ and I originally created these slides for the Actuarial Women's Committee and I gave a talk on the 13th of October on exam tips and techniques and I no invited all of you guys to come but yeah I think it was too short notice or some of you had business meetings or whatever but essentially what we're going to be doing in this video is just going through the slides that I presented or prepared for them that you guys can also use for for your upcoming exams. So yeah I mean I just gave them an introduction what is interesting is that I'm no longer just a consultant in the tech space I'm now working full-time for Polygon which is a layer 2 scaling solution for the Ethereum blockchain and I'm actually in the the NFT area so I am yeah I think I only started my role there on the 15th of October so really these slides are a little bit outdated but let's jump let's jump straight into it so when it comes to exams my view is that they've already started so the exam is not just the three hours when you're writing or typing but it's all the time before that as well so how you spend your time now is going to be crucial on whether you pass or fail this exam now as actuaries we tend to write a lot of exams in fact we spend a lot of time studying so it makes sense to maybe take a step back and say well why don't we study how to study maybe let's look at what is the optimal learning strategy and I know this sounds a little bit silly but the best thing to do in an exam is to think and I've been doing these courses I've been marking a lot of papers that students have done assignments and all these things and I find that what happens is that the students aren't they aren't thinking at a deeper level in fact I often see students answering a different question to what is asked and a lot of the times they lack structure they miss out obvious points or they start waffling about irrelevant things and I kind of realize that when we come to answering exam questions we're actually not very good at it so maybe some solutions that we can look at is think of the exam as having two main parts there's the studying stage and here we can use things from cognitive psychology artificial intelligence and I know the last one might confuse some people we'll talk about why it's important but it's mythology and then of course when it comes to the writing stage that's how to read a question properly how to think and then how to structure your answer and essentially the exam's got those two main parts we're all now in the studying stage and when we go into the actual exam that's when it's going to be the writing stage now a lot of the stuff that I'm going to be basing it on was because of Blaise Pascal he wrote this book called pensy which is what I was reading during lockdown last year and I mean Pascal I think we all kind of know about him he's he's like the boy genius I mean he was writing things on projective geometry looking at conic sections even inventing the early forms of the calculator all while he was just a teenager I mean then he even does stuff in physics with vacuums and fluids but the reason why most actors know about him is because of the probability theory that he did with Pierre de Fermat especially expected value I mean that they think pops up all the time and it was Pascal who who came up with it but what I really like about Pascal is the way he was almost the first person to think accurately and we see that in his whole notion known as the Pascal's wager because people used to come to him they used to say Pascal you're you're a boy genius you're a boy genius why do you believe in God like why do you subscribe to to religion because Pascal is a very devoted Catholic they said you know there's no evidence and all these kind of things and Pascal says no he says I agree you know the Bible's got enough light for for us to base our faith on but there's also enough shadow for for it to cost some doubt so we don't know so he says there is uncertainty into the existence of God but he says if we were to consider the frequency and severity then it makes sense to to believe in God and the whole idea very quickly was that if there is no God and you don't believe in him nothing happens if there is no God and you do believe in him nothing happens but if you don't believe in God and there is no God something bad might happen and if you do believe in God and God does exist then something great could happen and he said if you look at you know the payouts or the expected values says no matter what the frequency is the severity is so severe if there is a God that one should believe in it irrespective of how low that frequency would be and like I say it's very much a risk management answer a lot of theologians are like you know what about love and people maybe come and say well you're assuming that the Christian religion is the only one so of course there's a lot of philosophical debate that can be held around the final conclusion but the way he thought about it the way he constructed his argument was in my opinion the birth of actuarial science and it tied him very nicely with his probability theory that he was coming up with I know there was the Italian Cardona who was also kind of playing a little bit of the groundwork but essentially this was the the foundation of which actuarial science would be built upon I mean he heavily influenced Abraham DeMove who was a big champion of modern mathematical statistics and also Leibniz who was the you know the father of calculus I know we think Newton kind of did calculus and of course the royal society got Abraham because they thought he would be French and he'd be neutral to determine whether it was Newton the Englishman or Leibniz the German who you know came up with calculus but Abraham was secretly good friends with Newton and so he was like Newton is the champion of calculus interesting thing about Leibniz is he was the one who was originally sent a lot of mortality data and he passed on it and then Edmund Haley would take that data and of course construct the first premiums based on mortality and you know start to formalize actuarial science and that's why actuarial science kind of starts forming in in London but it very almost yeah could have formed in in Germany but Pascal very very important historical figure so much so that I almost called him the great grandfather of of actuarial science because Edmund Haley can maybe be seen as the grandfather and then of course William Morgan as the as the father William Morgan was the guy who actually started to formalize the profession and not just the mathematics and all that kind of stuff anyway they may not get too sidetracked on on a history lesson let's rather come into why we're why we're talking about Pascal because like I say he publishes this thing in 1670 and in this book he also talks about there being two types of intelligence he refers to it as being some people are mathematically intelligent and other people have got inquiry intelligence now the thing about actuarial science is that it selects for mathematical okay remember when you try to get into into university they looked at what was your maths mark or if you did really really well in maths everyone was like oh you should go and pursue actuarial science and yes a lot of the undergrad subjects are like that but what we're going to see especially now they were in the late eight exams that actuarial science requires both types of intelligence both mathematical and inquiry so like I say the earlier subjects are very mathematical these are your undergrad level these are your think the other brits are going to call them cms and css or in here in South Africa the a 100 the a 200 but you know this is stuff like financial mathematics mathematical statistics you know risk models and all these kind of things they are very very mathematical but we then get into the later subjects and these are more inquiry based so this is stuff that you sometimes do in your postgrad these in the South African codes the a 300 the f 100 and the f 200 so this is subjects like actuarial risk management or the specialist subjects as well as all the fellowship subjects but let's maybe look at what we what we mean by inquiry and I think the nice way to look at it is some of the inquiry professionals so lawyers detectives philosophers these are people who are very very intelligent when it comes to inquiry because what do we mean by that investigation asking questions the process of finding answers like say philosophy and the fellowship level we even have a joke saying that you always start your answer with it depends and you consider both sides before applying your actuarial judgment to determine what is the the more likely situation to to be but you're with inquiry intelligence like I say it's it's very different to to mathematical so a mathematician will be able to do the calculation the inquiry you know mindset will be like well why are we doing this this calculation so that's why I mean we're going to be talking about a little bit of things that I've pulled out of these DK books I really enjoy them big ideas simply explained we're going to be pulling from the psychology book and we're going to be pulling from the philosophy book and I think even later we even pull from the mythology one as as well but when we turn to let's say psychology in cognitive psychology there was this guy called Jerome Bruno who's actually still alive but he he revamped the entire American system of education with his ideas and his whole thing was that we learn things by active experience so instructing someone is not just telling them something but encouraging them to participate and we acquire knowledge through the use of reasoning by constructive meaning from the information and this is a form of information processing and the whole idea here is knowing is a process not a product and the whole thing here is that you should first present ideas in a simple and intuitive way you then continuously revisit and reconstructed them and then finally you start to connect all your knowledge in order to get comprehensive mastery of the subject and this little quote here we see when we acquire knowledge we need to actively participate and reason rather than passively absorb information because that is what gives knowledge meaning and I know at the beginning of every single actuarial course notes they talk about the difference of active studying and passive studying but still we see a lot of students they go to passive studying this is where you just read through the notes this is where you go you take a past paper and you take the solutions you read the question you read the solution you go um yeah I would have done that and you read the question you read the solution like um yeah I would have done that whereas active studying is putting yourself under exam conditions writing out those papers and then only going back and marking and then saying to yourself why did I get it wrong what was I looking at what am I maybe missing was it content maybe I misread the question you know how do I improve on this process so that I can get more accurate in the exam and these are the differences so there's different ways of studying it's not just the amount of time you put in but it's how you're doing it and if your studying is enjoyable then there's probably more on the passive side studying should be tough it should be draining if it's on the active side because you really are using a lot of energy to do it so like I said that's a little bit of the of the psychology coming into philosophy there's this one model um and that is that we've got this D I K W pyramid so this pyramid stands for data information knowledge and wisdom like I say it's just one model it's one representation of reality there are other ones but we're going to use this because it can be quite meaningful to help us understand how to study so one of the first questions we can maybe ask is say well how do we transform data into information and we can look at your own Bruno and the answer here is to give it meaning so for example if I just say 1991 okay this is just a number this is what we mean by a piece of data now already some of you when you see a number like 1991 you're already thinking of maybe a date but that's your brain working a little bit quicker um if you just look at it at its face value it's just a number it's just a piece of data it's only when I then tell you that yes you're correct it is a date and in fact this is the year in which I was born then you say oh MJ was born in 1991 that now is a piece of information so 1991 on its own is just data MJ was born in 1991 that is a piece of information now what we love about data is that we can process it you know we can take 2021 minus 1991 and we can get 30 again this is just a piece of data it's only when we now say well wait isn't 2021 the current year in 1991 we've just been told was Michael's year of birth hmm maybe this can give us some information around Michael's age and yes we can then say you know MJ is around 30 years old this is another piece of information so just 30 is data when I tell you it's my age it then becomes information and if we look at data science okay this is statistics mathematics and all these computational tools they aim to transform data into information so they do a lot of data processing and they try to give meaning to that data in order to get information and yes this is very very valuable but an actuary goes beyond in fact as actuaries we now need to look at information to knowledge so how do we transform information to knowledge and again if we had to use Bremer's ideas we do it by connecting it so a very very trivial example MJ is around 30 years old piece of information MJ lives in South Africa information the legal drinking age in South Africa is 18 that's information now if we connect it we can deduce that MJ is legally allowed to drink and this is knowledge that we've deduced from this information of course we can always just give a statement saying MJ is legally allowed to drink and what we've done here is we've condensed this knowledge back into information now what we see is knowledge is your web of information and it's formed through connection through meaning and through reasoning now a good little study tip is to try and distinguish information from knowledge and the reason why you want to be able to do that is so that you only commit information and the connections to your memory okay a lot of students fall into this trap of trying to learn knowledge off by heart and then they complain to me they say oh there's too much to learn i'm like there's actually not that much to learn if you can condense it back to information and its connections so what do i mean by this let's maybe give a very elementary example so if i say all fish like to swim and all cats don't like to swim i say joey's a fish and bob is a cat joey likes to swim bob doesn't like to swim we see here that we have six pieces of information but we can condense it into four and we can figure out joey and bob's preference to swimming we can say well we don't actually have to learn that joey likes to swim and that bob doesn't like to swim if we just learned that you know joey is a fish and all fish likes to swim then we can say well because joey is a fish he likes to swim and we can say the same we don't have to learn that bob doesn't like to swim because we know bob is a cat and cats don't like to swim we can therefore say that because bobby is a cat he doesn't like to swim but these two statements you can see that we don't have to learn them off by heart because we could have deduced them from other information so like i say that's a very elementary example let's maybe look more at a database to kind of make it see if this will maybe make more sense so a bad database design is when you record someone's id you record their date of birth and you record their age amongst a whole bunch of other things a good design is where you just need to record their id because especially here in South Africa you can determine the date of birth from the id number it's the first six numbers and you can determine the age from the date of birth so for instance if we had 1000 policy holders a bad design would have to store 3000 pieces of information 1000 id's 1000 date of births a thousand ages but a good design would only need to store a thousand pieces of information and two knowledge connections that will then allow me to call that other information if and when it is needed and we can see that this can get quite interesting when it comes to say our actuarial policies because a bad database design is when you're storing both the benefit and the premium and the waiting period and i mean you know insurance products there's a lot of parameters to them a better database design would be to look at not only just to say the relationship between benefit and premium but you know all the relationships between the product type and all the other parameters and this can really help you to reduce the amount of things that you need to store but let's talk about benefit and premium because there's normally quite a strong relationship between the two so you don't have to store both you just need to store one and the calculation to get the other one and they can drastically reduce the amount of data you need to store in your database and you can think of your brain as a database okay the less you need to remember the less likely you are to forget so a very very valuable skill while you're reading is to try and be able to distinguish is this information is this a first principle or is this deduced knowledge and if it's information that's what you want to learn if it's knowledge rather look at how it was formed and learn the connection rather than the knowledge itself and that's going to drastically reduce the amount of information that you need to read and learn for these upcoming exams so like I said don't fall into the trap of condensing knowledge into information and then trying to learn that off the heart then of course the final part of our pyramid is is wisdom and I mean what is wisdom and I guess there's different types of wisdom you know you get wild wisdom from divine revelations and you get you know wordly wisdom from from ancient teachings and all these kind of things but let's just maybe for simplicity say that wisdom is the optimal application of knowledge now we might ask ourselves how do we transform knowledge into wisdom this one's a little bit trickier we need this thing known as consciousness you know whatever that kind of means enlightenment and I guess maybe bringing it back to the profession we refer to it as actuarial judgment but again this is this is a difficult thing and it's one of the reasons why artificial intelligence hasn't become you know hasn't taken over the world yet is because from a programming point of view how do you program judgment how do you program consciousness it's still something that we don't really really understand but what we're going to see is that in the fellowship levels and even in the specialist subjects we are called or we are tested on our actuarial judgment which means as a student if you don't develop your consciousness if you don't become enlightened you're going to struggle in these specialist exams and I think that's why a lot of students they can do all the mathematical stuff they don't have this enlightenment or consciousness to have the inquiry mindset and then they struggle and they keep repeating these specialist subjects again and again and again and again so if that is you you might want to look at trying to develop the actuarial judgment and I mean one of the ways you can do it is by you know reading upon philosophy entering into ethics debates and just exploring that whole part of your mind because when we look at the exam type questions we've got the theory questions these are you know sometimes they're quite easy we just recall information so it's like how old is MJ now we take the date of birth we take the current date we subtract the two and boom we know how old MJ is we're recalling the information of when he was born in order to determine when it how old he is now theory questions can get a little bit hard when they want us to recall knowledge and you know the knowledge connections as well for example you know is MJ legally allowed to drink in South Africa now you have to know the drinking age in South Africa and MJ's age and then put those two together to determine whether he can or can't drink but in general theory questions if you've learned if you've put in the time and effort to memorize the information you should be getting 100% on this you then have the application questions which make up the bulk of the specialist subjects and you've got some easy ones where you simply have to apply the formula you know how old will MJ be in 2030 now it's like okay you know 2030 minus 1991 it's like a little bit like the theory but it's it's you know maybe it's just in a bit of a different setting of course you can also get some hard curveball questions you know was MJ allowed to drink alcohol in Belgium in 2008 now you maybe need information on what is the drinking age in Belgium how old was MJ in the year 2008 you know it can get a little bit more convoluted but essentially these are some of the application questions and then when you get to the fellowship level this is where your higher order questions start to appear this is where they become a lot harder okay in fact they aren't any easy higher order questions they're all hard they all require this wisdom or this actuarial judgment and I guess a fun a fun example would be you know how much alcohol should MJ drink at the next you know actuarial society or South Africa's convention and like I say with all of these answers it depends it depends if he's nervous it might be worthwhile having a drink or two to you know be able to socialize if he's presenting a very intense paper maybe he should stay away from the whiskey but like I said these are some of the exam type questions that we could could come across if we were to return back to to knowledge like I said we were talking about how we can connect information we can then transform it into knowledge we can maybe ask ourselves a little bit of a deeper question now you know how do we connect information and we can do so using things known as semantic relationships and semantic is just a fancy word I guess for for meaning and we see that this is used by artificial intelligence natural language processes unstructured databases and translators and how I actually came across it is I was working for a company that was creating unstructured databases in the insurance world and they were using these semantic relationships and when I was googling them I saw that they had links to to artificial intelligence I got really interested in AI started you know really just getting very excited about these things and I kind of thought to myself well if I can learn how machines learn and reverse engineer that maybe we can make a study method based on how machines are programmed to learn because maybe they would be very very efficient so if we look at how engineers are training machines maybe we can use that process to help us as individuals learn and so what we're going to see is that the semantic relationships that are denoted by a fancy Greek word and a and a question and we can use them to create intelligent mind maps as a study tool what I mean by an intelligent mind map essentially it's a mind map where you label the lines that connect the various concepts so let's maybe go through a few of these semantic relationships so the first one is the the hypernum and the the Greek word hyper means means above things someone's hyperactive they're more active than usual but in this content hyper above means we're looking at a more broader term and the question word that's linked to it is what is it so if you say I've got a cat and someone says what is a cat you can say a cat is an animal an animal or the concept of animal is above the concept of cat because cats inherit a lot from animals and all that kind of stuff well if we look at the other side of the relationship we've got hypno hypnonym hypno is the Greek word for below think when you get hypnotized you get put under and this is a more specific term you know so what are some examples of it so if I said my term is is a dog and I want to know what are the hypnonyms of dog then corgi pomeranian all those cute fluffy things those would be the hypnonyms of the concept of of dog we then have hollow name hollow is the Greek word for for whole and it's kind of like you know what system does it belong to think of the word holistic you know especially in enterprise risk management we talk about a holistic approach to risk management it means you want to look at the the whole so hollow is whole and the question here is you know what system does it belong to then we have marrow name where marrow is the Greek word for part and here we ask ourselves this question you know what is it made out of now these are the four main types of semantic relationships all the ones that I found out on the internet I went and I added a few more because I wanted to introduce which was the ones here that I introduced I wanted to look at what kind of concept do this is this red one which I referred to as the the active name then I wanted to also look at what could be done two concepts and this is what I referred to as the passive name then I also wanted to look at the parameters you know what are the various things that make it make it unique which I don't know if I should call it the paranum or the dimanum still still kind of contemplating that and then the associative which is you know what other concepts is it in means with and by means I mean association not those funny little pictures that you see on on reddit so very quick example of how to use semantic relationships like if I had to say to you discuss the concept of a house for 10 marks a lot of students would struggle they'd be like well a house is something I live in and then they'd be like you know what else do I say about it but if you take a concept and you look at each of the semantic relationships you can see that you can start pulling out a lot of information so if we had to start with say the hyphenum what is a house a house is a building hypnonum what are some types of houses well a house can be a cottage a hut a mansion etc hollownam you know where can one find a house what system is a part of and a house can be part of a neighborhood a village a town a city etc the maranum you know what is a house made out of well a house is a building and buildings are made out of roofs floors windows doors so maybe you know this house inherits from its hyphenum and the two also has roof floors windows doors etc then of course we've got the the asasinum you know what is a house associated with it's associated with wealth family comfort dogs maybe mortgages as as well loans and those things the diamond hyphenum you know what are the main parameters of a house its size its value its location its architectural style you can see we want to talk about a house for 10 marks there's a lot we can actually chat about when we start splitting it into these semantic relationships the passive hyphenum what can be done to a house well it can be designed it can be built it can be destroyed it can be painted it can be sold it can be mortgaged it can be flipped you know there's all these various things and then active hyphenum what can a house do it can shelter it can protect it can impress it can enrich etc etc and then we can put this all together on a nice I guess like I say a little mind map and then you can either connect it using different colors or on the links you can have the you know the question words connecting it and you can see there's a lot here that we can talk about if the exam was to ask us what is what is a house and where this becomes quite powerful is like let's say the question was you know what is a credit default obligation and you might be like oh gosh what on earth is that you're like but if you say hold on a credit default obligation is a financial instrument okay what are financial instruments well they belong to you know the financial system and maybe on a clearinghouse or there's investment bankers involved what can they do you know what do financial instruments do they can enrich people they can protect they can manage risks they can do this they can do all these kind of things and you can see even if you don't know what the thing is specifically you can still garnish a little bit of marks by looking at the hyphen and then seeing what of some of the standard or obvious things that it inherits so you won't get a hundred percent because you don't know exactly what the CDO is but you'll still be able to put in a bit of an answer so that you'd make sure that you pass the exam so semantic relationships are also quite powerful when it comes to entering into the exam when it comes to structuring your answers and also is a great way to tackle an exam question where you don't know the answer or you get maybe tripped up with a very strange concept that they throw at you so yeah semantic relationships they help us to understand more while studying less because I guess yeah we can use this inheritance property with the hyphen to learn less because we can see okay from the hyphen this is the information and it's not the knowledge that we have to condense back and you know fill our brains with those kind of things then we can also understand a lot more with with HoloLens knowing its place in a system this can also help us answer the question well why does it exist well oh maybe the system wouldn't function properly if this thing didn't exist that's like a very structured or simple answer to a very broad broad question but they can also help us generate new ideas I mean there's this thing called the scamper where you substitute combine add modify put other use eliminate or reserve that's the little acronym and here we can look at the marines we can ask us as well how crucial is each component you know it's kind of like well if we were to add an expiration date to whole life assurance oh look we get term assurance what would that do it would drastically reduce the cost of the premiums actually might make insurance a lot more affordable and we can maybe you know tap into a whole new sector of the market then we can be like well what if we were to substitute financial benefits for replacement products and we see that this is very effective and funeral insurance here in South Africa that is plagued by fraud that causes the premiums to be inflated and so by actually substituting a payment for for product then we know that fraudsters are not going to target this product that much so we can see that by understanding the semantic relationships not only can they help us to study and pass exams but they can also help us in the workplace in order to create new products and tap into new markets and you know provide finance to to more people at a more affordable cost so but I mean don't worry about that for now we just want to help us to structure our exam answers saying you know what is the question actually asking for this is a big one this is a big one because I asked the students you know what is finance I think we can actually get that onto that in the next slide and we saw that they answered the different thing so when you read the question maybe ask yourself okay does this question want me to give a hyphen or a hollownam and sometimes you know questions that are worth a lot of marks you can use these semantic relationships to give your answer structure so if they say I mean I actually think I've got a chair on the next slide so let's jump to it you know what is what is finance I asked my students in this F1 of five course what is finance for just one mark I was looking for the hyphen and if we look at the the word hyphen we could have said finance is a value system and the hyphen and link phrase is so whenever you see you know a cat is a animal a cottage is a house that is a phrase shows that we have a hyphen and link and this is so whenever you get asked the question what is something you should say something is a okay that's that's what I was looking for some of the answers I was getting some people saying finance is associated with and they went on and on and on and I was like okay that's the asosinum or I had someone actually had a couple of answers say I said what is finance and they started saying well there is corporate finance personal finance public finance and they then went into all explaining what those things were I was like okay great but you gave me the hypnonyms or someone was like finance is part of the economy and all these kind of things and I was like okay you know this is actually that's not the mirror and that would be the the hollownam because the the system that is part of but the whole thing here was that it was a very very simple question and not many of the students replied with saying finance is you know and you could even just say finance is a subject or finance is you know something people think they understand as long as it was just I was looking for that phrase is but I know with finance and even with the other course risk you know you say to someone what is risk risk is it's hard to fill in that blank and it's it does start you start you thinking you know and and that's what I do like about these questions now if I was to say what is finance for 10 marks this is where you can maybe say finance is a value system and then you can say well there are various types of finance such as corporate personal public you know it's part of the economy it's you know that's when you can start branching out but you first answer the question that is asked with that semantic relationship so like I say in the F-105 course which is the financial specialist and also with the F-106 students that I did we asked them what is risk they also struggle to answer it which is interesting because the subject is specializing in risk or specializing in finance and I'm asking well what exactly is it and we we seem to struggle with with a question like that of course there are problems with semantic relationships like I say one was to look at artificial intelligence they're amazing at theory and application questions you know if you only say like okay google what is the drinking age in South Africa it's going to say that drinking age is 18 or something like that but it's not very good at the higher order stuff right I say okay google you know how much should I drink tonight it's going to be like I don't think I understood the question properly and so what we see with semantic relationships is that they're very powerful for transforming information into knowledge but what study tool can we use to help us transform knowledge into wisdom and like I say maybe we're seeing that AI is struggling because it doesn't have this consciousness and I think a lot of students in actuarial science you know either they don't have the inquiry intelligent or maybe we're struggling because humanity itself is losing consciousness now what do I mean by humanity losing consciousness for that we're going to have to turn to Max Weber he is a philosopher on modern western society he looked at the impact of industrialization and his big idea was that rationality has put us into iron cages that science has sterilized our minds that we have become disenchanted with life and we see Eric Fromm who studied with Weber's brother would echo these concerns where he talks about life becoming standardized and robotic even Nietzsche would go on to predict nihilism you know the secular idea that life has no meaning and even now we find ourselves in this age of postmodernism where we're challenging the very concept of meaning and why this is all very very dangerous and why I think we're seeing people struggling with these exams is because we need meaning in order to learn so that's why we're now going to be turning on to two other books from DK the sociology book and the mythology book like I say this is where I do get a lot of resistance from students who are maybe writing the exam for for the first time they're like MJU you're a little bit of a crackpot but I think students who have failed the exam a couple of times and they're eager to look at an alternative method might be more open and yeah more open to maybe a little bit of a different idea so let's maybe look at the study tip of embracing mythology and the reason why I like mythology is because I asked myself this question you know why are mythic stories so easy to remember if you think about Zeus or you think about Thor or some of the Egyptian gods you read one or two of the stories once and you kind of remember them for a very very long time and I think it's because mythology is packed with meaning and so a good study tip is to create a narrative is to build up a story and if you do so you will be amazed at how much easier it is to recall information and how much easier it is to now start judging and discerning and again this isn't just an isolated you know Michael's gone crazy idea we see Robert Schillow won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2013 because he looked at psychology and how it relates to the market and his whole big idea was that the narrative drives the price of stocks and I've been looking at bitcoin and it's definitely driving the price of bitcoin so the global narrative around bitcoin very much determines what the price of it should be from bitcoin is dead to bitcoin is coming back to bitcoin is here to stay to all these kind of things it's the narrative that ultimately drives the price of bitcoin and like I say you can go read Robert Schillow he's got a book called animal spirits as well as a more recent one where he talks about you know the studies that he did which won him like I say the Nobel Prize in in economics and it's strange because a lot of economists they're like oh we don't want to touch this fuzzy stuff you know we want to stick to stick to our maths stick to our maths and our models but we kind of see that get out of the iron cage and and job just embrace these things so what I kind of do especially this works in in enterprise risk management which subject f106 I kind of look at mythology and in building up a whole course around it and I refer to risk as being a dragon sitting on a pile of gold and to me I say that the dragon is danger the gold is the opportunity and risk has got this dual nature and what we kind of see here is that if we run away from the dragons we forfeit the gold and that's just a I guess a mythological way of saying that removing risk completely also reduces the upside and I kind of see risk management is the armor we put on if our armor is too heavy we can't move it's also very very expensive and we see this happening in businesses where there's too much risk management it becomes very very restrictive for the business to innovate and do things however if the armor is too light there's not enough protection and you know these businesses are also left at being vulnerable they can get hacked and all these other crazy things now the fun thing with mythology is that you can add visuals to make your study notes a little bit more fun so whenever I think of risk I've got my dragon which is the the danger and I've got my gold which is the the opportunity then when we start branching off into risk concepts such as introducing an excess or attention limit you know there's little images that you can have with it I mean the risk tax on me then there's this idea in risk management where you can have two risks that can cancel each other out such as longevity and mortality risk think of it as a fire and ice dragon and then we spoke about some of the risk management and the armor and then you can really go crazy with your fantasy story think of corporate governance as you know the king talking to his advisors the regulators or the gods in the sky and then your insurer is essentially the witcher someone pays him money to go and fight their monsters he takes on the risk he takes on the danger that he might get eaten by this thing but if he does kill it the village is happy and you got to toss a coin to your witcher so you can use this whole story and some students really embrace it and they're able to memorize the content very very easy other students I know who maybe it's still stuck in the iron cage still holding hard on to to to science might see this as being being very very silly but what we essentially have is with our micro mythology this is kind of like for each subject or for each topic and then we can also have a macro mythology which we can almost use for life and for the whole actuarial profession and I guess Coral Jung he's got some quotes on this where Coral Jung he's basically him and Freud invented psychology or did a lot of groundwork on it he was a medical doctor worked at you know these mental asylums for I think it was like eight years and was able to cure people was able to cure people who had gone mentally insane just through talking by explaining what their dreams meant and all this kind of stuff but he said that myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science and he says the most important question anyone can ask is what myth am I living so let's look at Coral Jung's macro mythology and how we can then apply it to to our exams so yeah Jung had this whole idea that the goal of humanity I mean Nietzsche Nietzsche said not only does humanity lack a goal but it also lacks basic humanity but we'll put that to the side let's look at at Jung Jung's whole idea that the goal of humanity is to restore paradise I mean it's also if you look at a lot of the major religions especially the whole christian story you get kicked out of the garden of Eden Jesus comes and saves everyone and we will eventually all go back to to heaven we'll get restored into to paradise but it's this whole idea of restoring paradise I mean Donald Trump even used it in his whole campaign he didn't say let's make America great he said let's make America great again you know great again restoring paradise so this is I guess very very high level that the goal of humanity is to restore paradise of course paradise looks very differently to very different people so let's maybe say well what do we mean when paradise is restored so paradise is restored this is according to Jung when order and chaos are perfectly balanced so what we can do is we can confront chaos and establish order or we can cause chaos and we can disrupt order and like I said some people want more order some people want more chaos and this is what causes I guess the the general conflict in in our world because if people feel like there's too much chaos then there's confusion there's anarchy they feel like they're drowning in life if there's too much order some people feel like they're suffocating it's guess tyrannical and they can't move and if we look at humanity in specifically history even recently we tend to swing between these extremes think about it we have covered this is a an agent of chaos coming in everybody's getting sick so how do we confront this this you know huge chaos well we smack it with a lot of order we caused this lockdown literally no one is allowed to move closing down borders it was a lot of order but what happens people don't like you know suffocating there's a lot of problems psychological issues of people getting locked down that causes a lot of boiling a lot of you know people are like getting pent up and so what we had were protests all around the world there were protests you know in South Africa America everywhere kind of had protests which was a reaction to this extreme form of order and of course it's an element of chaos and sometimes there can be some damage and danger from it so what happens we need more order in the form of police which is restrictions fear arrest and we kind of tend to oscillate between chaos and order and all of these type of things but forget just reality if we were to turn to the entertainment and the movies that we watch we can see that this is kind of like our modern mythology I mean the whole story you know the Luke Skywalker saga or Star Wars Harry Potter they were all written based on Joseph Campbell's work you know The Hero with the Thousand Faces and he was very much a student of young who looked at all the structures of these mythological stories packed it up quite nicely I know Dan Hartman follows it almost to a T when he starts writing the Rick and Morty stories so we can almost think of this as our modern mythology and we see here that we've got different types of villains we've got your tyrannical villains these are your agents of order let's say Darth Vader and then Luke Skywalker is actually an agent of chaos he actually runs in there and he causes chaos by destroying the Death Star but then you also have villains who are anarchists these are the agents of chaos like in the movie the Joker you know Batman then needs to to bring order to Gotham because we've got the Joker blowing up hospitals and doing crazy things and then Batman is then kind of like an agent of order and I guess we can kind of consider as you know like I said what is finance we could almost say that finance is a system of order you know it's it's a system of value it rewards people for being productive but essentially it it orders people into how they should work where they should work and for how long they should work and what we see actually do is we're agents of order and our whole job description is to confront chaos in the financial system so for us risk is chaos risk management is is order that's why I mean think what does it actually do we create all these insurance and financial products to restore a person's financial situation after a catastrophe has befallen them so if someone in the family dies we give them a benefit to compensate for all the income that that loved one would have generated in order to take care of their dependence so actually we're part of this global mythology we're the agents of of order and the reason why I bring that up is because this is also another reason why I kind of feel some people are struggling with actuarial science because maybe it's not the myth that they want to be living because maybe if you're an artist or an entrepreneur and you're disrupting and you're creating you know then you're an agent of chaos so chaos and order are not necessarily good or bad you know they're a little bit of a little bit of both and I think why we sometimes see very intelligent people struggling with actuarial science is because unconsciously they don't want to be agents of order they'd rather be agents of chaos because there is a lot more fun I'm not gonna lie it is a lot more fun creating your own business throwing paint around then going through risk models so you need to ask yourself this question you know do you really want to be an actuary and sometimes there's a hard question for students who've come you know who've done all the the associate subjects or the mathematical subjects and are now struggling with the specialists and the fellowship ones you know to come to this realization now it's like oh I'm halfway you know did I maybe make the the right decision with regards to to my career and like I said this is what I had for my F106 students it was crazy because after I did this whole thing so in in F106 we've got the James Lam book on enterprise risk management and it was written by a guy who's based in Hong Kong and he talks a lot about the yin and the yang of risk management about how you've got to balance these two two forces basically of order and chaos and in every much of order you need a drop of chaos and in every chaos you need a drop of order and the best place to be is right in the middle and I mean those of you who are interested in property know that the most valuable property especially here in Cape Town is Clifton because you've got the ocean which is you know nature's chaos and then you've got the mountain which is nature's order and you're literally in between the two you're balancing these two things and that's why the property in Clifton you know with the mountain and the beach is the most valuable property in in town so we even see it manifesting in property markets but I brought this up because when I was going through the mock exam I first wrote the exam everyone did the things and then I realized gosh every single question that we did was either dealing with some sort of chaos or order and the aim of each of these questions essentially was to restore paradise so a lot of times students say to me I just didn't know what the exam question was asking you know what was I what was I doing so you can either look at you know what is the hyponym what is the hyponym which semantic relationship is it asking or you can take maybe come to this more mythological side and say hold on is there too much order is there too much chaos and does my answer ultimately restore paradise because a lot of times you read a student's answer and you're like well what was the point you you wrote a lot of things that look like you copied and pasted from the notes but what's your point what's your conclusion so always make sure that your conclusion especially in these fellowship and specialist subjects that they're restoring some sort of of paradise and it can be very valuable if you can identify if there's too much chaos there's too much order and you know which one do you have to maybe confront or establish and all those kind of things so I guess in conclusion the big thing here is that the exam has already started okay what you do now will influence your chances of passing and so the best way to study is to make it meaningful don't be passive be an active learner and that means using semantic relationships this is the science and the logic behind meaning or creating mythology and these are like I say stories enriched with lots and lots of meaning and the best way to answer your exam questions is therefore to make it meaningful so use the semantic relationships to plan and structure your answer and then use mythology say am I confronting a chaos am I disrupting an order does my answer restore paradise and like I say when I gave this for the Actual Women's Committee there was space for us to ask questions and do all that kind of stuff and I guess you can do that in the comment section below so let me know your thoughts any questions and yeah we can chat a little bit more about it I know this has been a long video so let me not waste any more time and let me say all the best for the exam and I'll speak to you all soon cheers