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First off, I think the divide between sciences and humanities is at least somewhat dodgy.
That said, I think a lot of claims about the necessity of humanities for critical thinking are dodgy too. You know what forces learning critical thinking, since it absolutely is ruthless about cherished assumptions? Debugging. You may hold whatever beliefs you like about the behaviour of a piece of code, but if they don't correspond with reality, you will crash against a debugger until you correct them. And, most often if you're debugging in the first place, it's because you thought something wrong about the code to begin with. Debugging is a systematic and merciless machine for changing one's mind. If you can't change your mind, you can't debug.
Also, the notion that humanities somehow exempts or protects against the ethical drift that many people in technical fields fall into is ludicrous. It's capitalism and profits, not maths, causing the damage. Kissinger studied political science and history, not physics.
Redrafted because, as usual, I made typos.
@modulux you're right about the humanities not protecting people against ethical drift, but I think they're useful for helping people to disbelieve some impressive-sounding words without actually going to the other extreme of disbelieving all words.
Coding may teach adjacent skills, but in my experience, people need a lot of help transferring skills across domains. It's not something that happens automatically. Which is why I think we all need a fair bit of STEM education too.
@yingtai Oh, definitely. I think what irks me a bit is this attitude that humanities are, well, somehow better or more human, and that of course everyone should be exposed to them (true) but not to icky maths (that's for weird nerds).
I might be making too much of it, it's just how some of it comes across; my view is that being reasonably well-rounded and having exposure to a wide range of things is important, and as you say skills don't so easily and directly transfer across domains.
@modulux Ah, I am much relieved that we agree! :D