08 Jun 2023

Copy & paste is operationally dangerous

Brian Fannin

Research Actuary at Casualty Actuarial Society
Join us with Brian to chat about his journey as an actuary who loves open-source tools and enabling committees and research partners to work efficiently in developing relevant, practical content.
Watch this hangout

Episode notes

We were recently joined by Brian Fannin, Research Actuary at Casualty Actuarial Society. 

During the hangout (38:46) with Brian, we spoke a bit about the areas where actuaries are turning to code-first data science.

A big selling point for actuaries is when they find out they can replace a very typical actuarial and analytic workflow of creating a plot in Excel and copying and pasting it into Word. That’s operationally inefficient. It’s operationally dangerous.

The notion that my entire analytics report is in one file: all of the code, all of the narrative, all of the tables, it’s like telling me that I can breathe underwater and fly.

I think that as actuaries become aware of that capability, they will get happy about it as will the people who need to communicate with actuaries.

Imagine you’re in a meeting and you have everyone looking at the same file and the plot didn’t update. 

“What do you mean we’re losing $1 billion a day?” 

“Oh, sorry, that’s yesterday’s graph. Today it is…”

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Resources shared during the hangout:

R for Actuaries and Data Scientists: https://info.actexmadriver.com/r-for-actuaries

Deep Learning with R (Second Edition): https://www.manning.com/books/deep-learning-with-r-second-edition

The Theory That Would Not Die: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300188226/the-theory-that-would-not-die/

CASDatasets: http://cas.uqam.ca/

R4DS Community: https://r4ds.io/join

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