I do think actuarial science provides tools that many folks in this community should find useful

Could you say more? Examples? I've downloaded your suggested textbook (presumably you've worked through it?), and read through the table of contents; while some of the overlap with economics and regular statistics looks mildly interesting, a lot of it looks heavily specialized to, well, insurance stuff like different premium payment schemes which I have no idea how I would ever find useful outside life insurance.