It's also ironic to me that someone would try nuanced communication on Twitter, a platform whose very design discourages it. You can't do nuanced communication in 280 characters, but you can do vitriol just fine. So they do the tweet storm which turns off anyone who isn't incredibly interested in what you're saying.
I agree, but I think it's more nuanced than this: smart people can regularly be observed being unable to think critically during conversations (particularly on certain topics), yet the same people can think critically writing code. Assuming this is true (it's certainly quite true), it seems to me that differences between these two contexts causes the mind to behave differently.
At the time I was forced to take the course, it felt pointless to me, but after reading Thomas Kuhn’s book (SoSR) several years later, I can look back and connect the dots.
Learning about the history of science was meant to punctuate a widely held myth, that our civilization has been progressing linearly and cumulatively. Kuhn found that the way textbooks are written create the illusion in the mind of the student that scientific advances have been linear and cumulative, rather than being interrupted by paradigm shifts, as old approaches are abandoned in favor of new ones.
Nuance comes down to being able to view an issue from multiple perspectives, that in a lot of situations, there is often more than one (correct) answer.