Jason,

The actuarial profession is also highly caught-up in measuring risk and pricing risk loads based on volatility measures (covariance, short-fall risk, VaR, etc.) and spends an inordinate amount of time on the theory of parceling-out shared covariance among risks (should it be additive, subadditive, should if be variance-based or standard deviation-based?). The profession, like modern finance, has found itself lost deep within the woods at the midpoint of its journey. However, like in the stock market, this theoretical pricing of risk is largely inconsequential, because ultimately it is the market that is the arbiter, not the actuary or theoretician going through the motions of a pricing model in a spreadsheet.