This happens more often than it should in our profession. We read reports, proposals, and especially requests for proposals where the language is superficially sophisticated, but the actual message remains unclear. The natural response is to label this a “communication problem” – someone who knows their stuff but just can’t explain it clearly.

I think that misses the real issue.

The Real Problem Runs Deeper

If your thoughts actually aren’t that clear, you aren’t going to get them down clearly on paper. What appears as a communication issue is often actually a structured thought process problem.

I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly, especially with students and younger professionals. They’ll struggle to answer a question clearly, whether in writing or in person. When you dig deeper, it’s not that they can’t find the right words – they haven’t really figured out what they think about the problem in the first place.

The communications exam can be a bugbear for some people, and for different reasons. But some of the time when I see communication being a struggle, it’s students not being able to read the question, not being able to answer the question, or in our case with clients (or their procurement teams), not understanding what they’re really actually asking for. Because communication is at least half listening and receiving as it is writing down.

If you can’t understand the question and think about it, you can’t put your answer down, or your proposal down, or your scope down clearly. If your scope isn’t clear, good luck ever delivering on it.

Lead Astray To The Jargon Trap

There’s another layer to this problem that’s particularly acute in technical fields. Students get led astray by their peers, by teachers, and then by a lack of self-confidence about the right way to sound professional. They convince themselves that the way to appear competent is to use the fanciest, most convoluted language possible.

This becomes a malignant habit that gets reinforced over time – the more impressive you sound, the more professional you must be.

The opposite is true.

No one knows what you’re actually saying. I’m not sure you entirely know what you’re saying either.

The Writing Test

Here’s something I’ve learned from two decades of consulting: I can have seemingly amazing, brilliant ideas in my head that make complete sense. But when I have to write them down and explain them to somebody else, I sometimes realise it was complete nonsense. There were fatal flaws in my thinking, but it’s hard to keep all those complex ideas organised in your mind.

When you put it down on paper, you realise that doesn’t really work.

The discipline of writing – even if nobody else is ever going to read it – forces you to organise your thoughts. It reveals the gaps in your logic, the assumptions you haven’t examined, the connections that seemed obvious but actually don’t hold up.

This is why I find putting down notes incredibly useful, regardless of whether anyone else will see them. Writing isn’t just about communicating your ideas to others; it’s about clarifying them for yourself.

What Actually Works

The solution isn’t complicated, but it requires discipline:

First, figure out what you actually think. Before you worry about how to say something, make sure you know what you’re trying to say. If you can’t explain it simply to yourself, you don’t understand it well enough yet.

Second, choose clarity over impressiveness. Every time. The goal is understanding, not demonstrating your vocabulary.

Simpler words, simpler sentences, shorter sentences (but also a mix), active voice, more paragraphs and consciously ordered lists and tables – are all far more important than demonstrating familiarity with a thesaurus.

Third, take the reader on a clear journey. They haven’t been thinking about this for months like you have. Start where they are, not where you are.

Fourth, test your writing. Read it back. Better yet, have someone else read it. If they can’t follow your logic, that’s not their problem – it’s yours.

Beyond the Mechanics

I had the benefit of UCT’s Professional Communication Unit way back in 2001, which taught style and tone and formatting and structure. Everything they covered is still absolutely valid and relevant today – which says something about how timeless good communication principles are. But the technical aspects of writing – grammar, formatting, structure – are just the delivery mechanism.

The real work happens before you start typing: the work of thinking clearly about what you’re trying to accomplish, what your reader needs to know, and how to get them from where they are to where you want them to be.

This matters more than we sometimes acknowledge. Clear writing isn’t a nice-to-have skill that you add on top of technical competence. It’s fundamental to how you think through problems, how you test your ideas, and how you turn insights into action.

If you can’t write clearly about what you do, there’s a good chance you don’t understand it as well as you think you do.

This raises an important question: Should developing markets, including South Africa, adopt SFCR-style public disclosures? How do weigh the costs and benefits, and is this calculus different than in Europe?

The Case for Public SFCR Reporting

Enhancing Industry-Wide Risk Management

• Public disclosures let insurers benchmark themselves against their peers, highlighting best practices and exposing weaknesses.
• Insurers gain valuable insights into what “good” looks like, thus driving overall improvements in industry risk management standards.
• To my own interests, having more detailed information to understand the insurance sector and perform benchmarking would be invaluable. Hopefully my work has some value for individual insurers and maybe even the industry as a whole, but I recognise this point may have less weight for others.

Transparency and Trust

• Detailed reports provide analysts and policyholders with greater clarity into insurers’ operations, solvency, and risk strategies.
• It becomes significantly more challenging for insurers to differently represent (a range from gentle positioning to heavy spin to outright misrepresentation) their financial or risk positions to different stakeholders such as management, control functions, boards, analysts, and regulators when comprehensive information is publicly available.

Better Stakeholder Discipline

• Enhanced transparency makes it more difficult for insurers to conceal emerging solvency or risk issues, thus prompting earlier and more effective regulatory or market intervention.
• Analysts and rating agencies benefit from having direct access to consistent, detailed data, promoting market discipline and investor confidence.

The Downsides and Challenges

Cost and Complexity

• Producing detailed SFCR-style reports is resource-intensive, requiring substantial actuarial expertise, time, and money—resources that are often scarce in developing markets. This is not generally true in South Africa, but is absolutely true across the rest of the continent. Anyway, just because there are resources in South Africa doesn’t automatically mean this is the best use of their time, or that additional demands on these resources won’t impact the supply-demand equating level of salaries and therefore costs for insurers.
• Many insurers in developing markets face significant skills shortages, making it challenging to produce consistently high-quality reports. The level of current internal reporting could benefit from additional resources and time as it is.

Competitive Sensitivities

• Public disclosures risk exposing sensitive strategic insights to competitors, potentially placing companies at a disadvantage in competitive markets. This is often mentioned by insurers – it came out with the original IFRS4 disclosure requirements and again with the IFRS17 disclosure requirements.
• The thing is – I don’t know how many people trawl through competitor financial disclosures to uncover secret strategic source. I’m not dismissing the point, but I am questioning how much of an issue this is. With staff turnover and rotation through industry, there are plenty of mechanisms for more crucial practices to disperse across insurers.

Quality and Utility Concerns

• My experience across large numbers of South African insurers suggests that many insurers already go through the motions, incurring costs without value, in producing ORSA (Own Risk and Solvency Assessment) reports that are not used internally for anything other than compliance.
• Without careful oversight, SFCR-style reports risk becoming tick-box exercises—costly documents that serve regulatory compliance rather than genuine risk management.

Finding the Right Balance

Considering these points, adopting SFCR-style public reporting in South Africa and other developing markets should be approached cautiously:

• Incremental Implementation: Gradually introduce public disclosures, starting with key sections but with a clear roadmap so that insurers know now what they are building towards. There is merit in starting and producing something rather than having endless projects to produce some grand opus in 5 years’ time.
• Proportionality Principle: Ensure reporting requirements align with the insurer’s size and complexity – but this can’t mean that small insurers do nothing. The relevance of risks to each insurers must be considered.
• Standardisation with Flexibility: Provide clear reporting templates to minimise redundancy, enabling insurers to leverage internal reports such as ORSAs, thereby enhancing ongoing risk management practices. There is value in allowing insurers to customise their approach, especially for an ORSA, so that it is most useful for their internal purposes. However, the SFCR is an external document. There is arguably greater merit in standardisation for the reader (ease of navigation, ease of comparability) and for the producer (less time spent changing structure and content and wondering what is expected). Sometimes paint by numbers can great bang for buck.

Final Thoughts

Public SFCR reporting undeniably offers valuable transparency, improves risk management practices, and strengthens market discipline. However, the real challenge is striking a balance—achieving meaningful disclosures without imposing excessive burdens. If implemented thoughtfully, tailored to market realities, and aligned with insurers’ practical capacities, SFCR-style reports could become an essential part of strengthening insurance markets in South Africa and beyond.

In a world where even detailed internal reports like the ORSA are often unread compliance artefacts, is it naïve to think public SFCRs will be any better? Maybe. But transparency has a strange way of forcing people to care. It may be that the SFCR, being publicly available to analysts, regulators, academic researchers, students, and consultants (!) will find more traction and more use than most ORSAs.

The act of writing for an external audience can clean up fuzzy thinking and force clearer articulation of risk positions—something that internal-only reports often fail to achieve. It’s one thing to desire diverse views on a Board, but group-think and anchoring are all too common. I’ve lost track of the number of times the discipline of writing things down has made me realise the ideas in my head weren’t quite as brilliant or even consistent as I’d thought.

Perhaps SFCRs can do that at scale.

Nudge Theory

• Concept: Small changes in choice presentation can significantly influence decisions.
• Application: Using social comparison feedback (e.g., “80% of homeowners in your area have flood insurance”) to encourage consideration of additional coverage. Also, implementing gamification elements in health insurance apps to promote healthier lifestyles, potentially reducing health-related claims.
• Replicability: Consistently strong results across various domains, making it a robust finding.

The Watching Eyes Effect

• Concept: Displaying images of eyes or a face can encourage honest behavior.
• Application: Used in various settings, including online insurance, to promote truthfulness.
• Replicability: Mixed results, with effectiveness varying by context.

Default Options

• Concept: Setting beneficial default choices (e.g., higher insurance coverage) can lead to better outcomes.
• Application: Widely implemented in insurance and savings products.
• Replicability: Generally reliable, though effect sizes can vary.

More on this in the excellent Freakonomics podcast episode 572

So far it’s clearly been too easy as she gets them every time. That’s okay, I still plan to beat her at Carcassonne someday. It turns out it’s quite a fun way to tell her slightly unbelievable stories about my life as well as teaching her to think about whether what she’s told is true or not.

I hope the telling of untrue stories doesn’t make any of them stick in her mind.

We’ll see how long it is before she only ‘believes’ in the easter bunny in order to get the chocolate eggy loot.

Ideas become words and then words become ideas all on their own.

The latest controversy arose a few days ago a year ago (this post has been in draft for a long time…) because Russia is planning to increase the normal retirement age from 60 to 65 for men by 2028 and 55 to 63 for women by 2034.

Russia propose raising retirement age above life expectancy

WHO puts life expectancy at birth at 66 for men and 77 for women. (as at 2016). Now you may already have noticed a terminology difference here.:

• “Life expectancy at birth” is a well defined term estimate the mean age at death of someone just born.
• “Life expectancy” without a modifier generally implies this as well, but can be misunderstood
• “Life expectancy given survival to age x” or “life expectancy by age x” is how long one is expected to live, given your current age x.

Problematically, terms to differentiate “remaining life expectancy” (the number of years remaining) and “total life expectancy” or “expected lifetime” (the total number of years expected to live including those already survived) are not used consistently.

Every day that you dodge death, your total life expectancy goes up.  An 18 year old, with newly conferred adult status, will have a total life expectancy somewhere between 0 and 18 years higher than their life expectancy at birth, depending on how dangerous childhood was expected to have been in the calculation of the original life expectancy (at birth) calculation.

Progression of Life Expectancy at birth for almost all countries remains on an upwards trajectory

The World Bank has a useful interactive tool for plotting useful figures. Here is the progression of life expectancy at birth for a subset of countries.

There have been gains even in recent years (opposed to over hundreds of years, where the massive gains are widely accepted).  The gains are not without interruption.

• South Africa, in particular, was hit by HIV/AIDS for many years. HIV/AIDS affects the mortality of babies and young children through mother to child transmission. This has a particularly potent impact on life expectancy at birth.
• Mortality improvements in the UK have slowed down dramatically in the last few years.
• Life expectancy in the US has actually gone backwards in recent years, partly linked to opioid abuse and suicide.

So what?

One of the reasons this blog post took ages to come out is after a bit of rambling I wasn’t sure what the conclusion is.  This would need to be a much longer post to really cover any amount of the detail. However, perhaps this provide a tiny taste of the complexities involved with the terminology (ab)use and the actual numbers and drivers.

]]> https://twentythirdfloor.co.za/2019/05/15/not-this-old-outcry-again/feed/ 0 https://twentythirdfloor.co.za/2019/05/14/illusory-truth/ https://twentythirdfloor.co.za/2019/05/14/illusory-truth/#comments Tue, 14 May 2019 12:16:48 +0000 https://twentythirdfloor.co.za/?p=2679 I’ve been using snopes.com to fact check dubious stories since before fake news was a term. I still recommend it to everyone.

I also teach elements of critical thinking in some of the actuarial normative skills workshops I run. By the time students get to me there, they are often already pessimistic and cynical when it comes to core areas of work (to be clear, this is a criticism of the profession, with a silver lining of critical thinking). However, there are plenty of other areas where their minds still seem susceptible to fake news.

This re-energised my interest in this area. I’ll blog on this topic more in future. One area I discovered in my research is the Illusory Truth Effective.

The Illusory Truth Effect is a really disappointing insight into how poorly our brains do at identifying truth. At its core, it says that when subjects are exposed to facts multiple times, even if the facts are highlighted as being false, still increases the probability that those subjects will view the facts as true. So whether it is on a Sunday morning surrounded by friends and family, or on the couch on your own infinitely browsing social media, what you see and hear and read becomes true in some proportion of minds.

It also applies to election campaigns and political rhetoric.

I’m going to test this with my actuarial students next chance I get.

Given the long silence, there are quite a few topics I’ve been thinking about and discussing with friends and colleagues. You’ll have to check in from time to time to see those discussions translate to a blog.

On the death of blogs and privacy

Blogs have changed since 2006 when this blog started. I don’t know when “peak blog† was, but it seems to be in the past. The audience monopolisers of facebook, twitter, LinkedIn, youtube, Instagram and more have, by turns, elevated and expanded voices, then monetised, controlled and manipulated those same audiences. In some, often ultimate tragic, scenarios, audiences are pushed to extreme views as an inevitable result of revenue-maximising, attention monopolising algorithms.

Brexit and Trump are the two big stories about the role of social media and revenue-maximising, attention-sink algorithms. There are countless more. I found this sobering TED talk about the disconnect between reality and perceptions. The talk uses a small Welsh village as a powerful example to demonstrate the impact of social media and at the same time the lack of transparency that makes these claims difficult to provide and all the more terrifying.

My journey away from the brink

In the last few months I’ve been on a security and privacy journey. Ironically, I harbour suspicions that this journey itself may be the result of the same pressure to extremes that youtube in particular is famed for. But each time as I try to opt out of webs of tracking and analytics cookies and code I am reminded how much tracking and identification is going on in the background and how defenceless almost all internet users are.

Sheepishly, I realise my prior habits of eagerly providing all my contact details and information to google, facebook and LinkedIn for vague, unspecified reasons makes me some of the most naïve out there.  Facebook has been dead to me for several years. Since then, the base of research highlighting facebook’s adverse role in mental health, time-wasting, election meddling and terrorism makes that decision look even better than it feels.

Some unsoliciated privacy advice

If for some reason you are still on facebook, download your data (including contacts and birthdays if that is important) and delete your profile. Then avoid the nagging siren songs for a couple of weeks from facebook to try to entice you back onto the rocks. Your life will be better.

For now, I think I will continue to use Twitter and LinkedIn to post new blogs to reach a greater audience where users have become so used to those being the only places to monitor for anything.

I still watch clips on youtube, but I do so without logging in and with tracker blocking extensions loaded up in full force. I am aggressively migrating away from Gmail (about 90% complete) and now only check Gmail via an email client that doesn’t require me to log in to google. It’s easier than you might think. I hope you too will ditch Gmail, so that my emails to you aren’t also put into the machine for their monetary purposes.

I’ve ditched Chrome and am fortunate to have an iPhone and, generally, Apple seems less utterly compromised on this front.

Whatsapp remains a problem. Facebook owns WhatsApp and collects tonnes of metadata. Download signal and use that and help me slowly wrench the network benefits away from them.

Born again without google trackers

So that’s all background to this technical update on this blog, which is actually the primary purpose of this post. Almost since inception, I have used google analytics to track users and interest on my blog. It’s useful to understand which posts are most useful and interesting. However, I feel I owe you at least as much privacy protection as I’m trying to give myself. As of a couple of days ago, I have removed google analytics from this site and am using a self-hosted tool which keeps your data out of evil hands.

You are very welcome to block this tracker too.

Future blog topics?

I will explore thoughts on privacy (and longevity, and AI and risk and capital and hyper-selection and fairness and more as usual) in coming blogs.

Possibly helpful resources on privacy

Here are some of the resources I’ve discovered and have influenced my thinking and the tools I’m using as widely as possible.

• Firefox with appropriate extensions and add ons (ublock origin, canvas blocker)
• (or if you want to go all out, TOR browser…)
• Book to get you motivated – Ten arguments to delete your social media accounts now by Jaron Lanier
• Podcast for those with long commutes with Sam Harris and Jaron Lanier (author of 10 arguments to delete your social media now)
• Signal messaging app
• If you must keep Gmail, use something like thunderbird email client (open source, free, cross-platform. There are slicker options available too. There are many more private email options compared to Gmail, but I’m not going to recommend one as suitable across a wide range of use cases and individual preferences.

Clickbait headline? Check.

“3 Smart Alternatives to Life Insurance“

Numbered list (the second one will surprise you…)? Check. 

Also, another numbered article by the same author “5 Viable Uses For A Reverse Mortgage”. No, I’m deliberately not linking. Then, without irony, another article, “The Death Of Click Bait Is Finally Here”.

Okay, but back to the actual topic. The first sentence in the article:

The simplest alternatives to life insurance include investing money and or saving it. If you are able to set aside enough funds each year, you can very well never have to worry about holding a life insurance policy.

So, in other words, a smart alternative to life insurance is just not having insurance at all.

The other two “smart alternatives” are, actually, life insurance. So the sum total of smart alternatives offered are “no insurance” and “life insurance”.

Maybe it’s fitting that the author describes himself:

Lazar is pronounced in his uncanny but effective content…

uncanny: strange or mysterious, especially in an unsettling way.  Check.

Cunningham’s Law states “the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”