Spin the Coin

Waves of randomness batter individuals the hardest. Our best efforts can be swamped by chance, and the lotteries of birth – geography, genetics, community, time. Take a big step back, and you lose and gain information. Spin a coin once, and you have no idea whether it will be heads or tails with confidence. Spin it a million times, and if the coin is fair, it will be a hair’s breadth from half a million of each. One way to control for unwanted noise is to pool the risk. Let your fate be decided by the million spins, rather than the one. Be part of a group. To accept that, you must accept the cross subsidies. A Cross Subsidy is where one group of consumers pay a higher price, so that another group pay an artificially lower price. It is like splitting the bill. The question is when you will care enough about the container to be okay with splitting. If you intentionally had salad and water, you are going to be bitter about paying for steak and champagne. Understandable. That is different from voluntarily acknowledging the coin of life has treated you well, and chipping into the container of 7.8 billion individual spins. Even though you already know the result, and can pretend it is merit.

Your Own Fate

I find the initial stages of learning confusing. In a physical way that affects my breathing, my tingling skin, and my wide eyes. Education often does more filtering than teaching. Levels sort the good from bad, and move on. Searching for naturals. Searching for the chosen ones. Chosen by fate. Except different skills are needed in the early stages of gaining skills and knowledge. My secret power is I am as stubborn as a donkey. I take the next step. In my Actuarial exams, I was very structured. Early exams took 100 hours each. Later ones 300 hours. I put the hours in. How often do we put 100 hours into something, before deciding we can’t do it? How often do we ask whether the way we learnt is the best way to learn, before deciding we can’t do it? Two mentors stand out for me as teaching me practical methods on “How to learn”. Mr Saayman (my History teacher), taught me as a 12-year-old how to summarise. Pin down the main thing. When I was 20 years old, David O’Brien,(an Actuary who had finished what I was starting) reinforced the idea of spending 8 minutes on a 5 mark question, and no more. Move on. Exams are a process. No individual question is the main thing. Part of learning is accepting confusion as part of the process. Make your own fate.

Make your own fate