Just who do you suppose was held back by "excessive rationality"? I'd suggest that many many more people in the world are held back by "not enough rationality".

Just who do you suppose was held back by "excessive rationality"? I'd suggest that many many more people in the world are held back by "not enough rationality". There is no stereotypical "scientists' disdain" for those topics. It is vital to understand history, social sciences, economics, politics, and the arts. What is disdained is the way these topics are, in the present world, not pursued along more rigorous lines. Too many people like to look good by producing grand-sounding theories about these topics, without putting their ideas through a more rigorous process to check whether they are actually true or not. Then we get a cohort of followers who believe these theories as if they were "as true" as mathematical theorems, but they are not. This wastes everyone's time, and worse. One can certainly picture an overly-specialised scientist who doesn't know anything other than the specific field they chose - I guess this is what you mean by "excessive rationality" - but I don't see many cases of this actually existing. What I see in far greater numbers is the problem I mentioned in the previous few paragraphs, as well as people using the "excessively rational" image as a straw-man argument to attack scientists, to distract the world from their own flaws, of "not enough rationality".