This is not exactly an answer to your questions, but I do think actuarial science provides tools that many folks in this community should find useful, and for that reason it might be a discipline worth learning. Textbooks are usually the quickest and best way to learn new material; for actuarial science, a good choice is Fundamentals of Actuarial Mathematics, by David Promislow (free pdf)
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.
It occurred to me this morning that, if it's actually valuable, generating true beliefs about the world must be someone's comparative advantage. If truth is instrumentally important, important people must be finding ways to pay to access it. I can think of several examples of this, but the one that caught my attention was actuarial science.
I know next to nothing about what actuaries actually do, but Wikipedia says:
Why, that sounds right up our alley.
So what I'm wondering is: for those who can afford it, wouldn't it be worth contracting with actuaries to make important personal decisions? Not merely with regards to business, but everything else as well? My preliminary ideas include: