> Is it really?
Yes.
> I can make abstract models of all kinds of things and still get accurate predictions.
If you think that's working for you in dealing with human emotions, well...
How many non-STEM people have you persuaded to change their lives for the better with that approach?
For that matter, how many STEM people's lives have you impacted meaningfully that way? I'd guess more, but still not very many.
> ...How are humanities helping me with that?
I studied humanities intensely until I reached college. I was a semi-pro flutist for several years after, a good enough pianist that I could have gotten into music programs, and I was (and am) a good reader, world-builder, and editor (mainly of fiction, but sometimes non-fiction as well).
All that was, in fact, spectacular training for software development, as it taught me several lessons that many programmers I have encountered do not seem to have learned:
- You cannot understand anything meaningful perfectly.
- Nothing complex can be perfectly rigorously formalized by the human mind. The closer you get, the smaller the percentage of humans that can and will understand it becomes.
- A well-trained intuition for metaphor and symbolism can be a spectacular workaround for the problems presented by the previous two points. Many great artists don't realize the full depth of the symbolism and metaphors they themselves have created until their sharpest audience members help them see it, and that richness can communicate things not even the author fully understands. As an acquaintance whose name is escaping me once said, "Poetry is fundamentally about those things which cannot be named."
- Technical skills like software development or structural engineering, while they take some time and a reductionist mindset to learn, are not the hard part. I had absolutely no native talent for software and while I'll never be world-class, I'm pretty useful in a lot of contexts now. You can just learn it, unless you have biological problems with your intellect.
What's hard is seeing the complexity in this world as it truly is, understanding how far beyond your grasp it is, seeing how blindingly, dizzyingly beatiful it is despite the broken shards strewn throughout reality's nature, and finding ways to actually, genuinely take care of other people, without doing more harm than good due to inattention, arrogance, excessive reductionism, or any of the thousand other failings that plague us.
Humanities, especially music, taught me that technique is not the hard part by showing me starkly that blisteringly difficult technical exercises are often stultifyingly boring. When a field's whole point is aesthetic effect, it's far easier to see the ways in which technique matters and the ways in which it doesn't.
...this little rant is poorly written and structured, for which I am sorry. I have small children, so the amount of time I have to indulge in the lesser-paying pursuits I love, such as writing reasonably coherently about the humanities, is sadly limited.
In fact, I considered just deleting my response, because it's not a very good piece for its intended audience, but maybe it gets a little or what's in my head across.
In summary: I heartily agree that tech could use more humanities influence, especially software. I suggest particularly to other humanities-type creatives that software is a field that is fundamentally creative but which is also lucrative, due to it taking some work to learn, and it therefore makes a great day job.