zlacker

> Also there is a certain lack of training in clear thinking with words and ideas that are not emphasized in STEM curriculum but are emphasized in the humanities. I took a fair amount of history and literature in college....

Or the most potent disciplines: epistemology and logic. I believe epistemology and logic when combined with decomposition (something programmers usually have excellent capabilities in) make it fairly easy to determine where the weakest links in any given argument lie. A big problem though (in addition to the fact that we don't teach this sort of thinking): the human mind seems to have evolved to have an extremely strong aversion to exercising these skills on certain topics (something barely taught at all in western curriculum of any kind, the closest being psychology, which doesn't get a lot of respect from most people).

>>mister+(OP)
The whole depending on a proposition for your salary, yeah. And clear and precise arguing can certainly be put into service for obfuscating relatively simple truths. But the skill is useful.