As a physics major who the requirements helped, especially my philosophy courses (an intro one and a Philosophy of Science course), I think a lot of it comes do

As a physics major who the requirements helped, especially my philosophy courses (an intro one and a Philosophy of Science course), I think a lot of it comes down to teachers, and how the material is presented. It was never presented to me as boring, and the teachers never tried to claim it was more important than science or the end-all-be-all of the future. And all of that eventually led me down the road where I'd rather do more work in the humanities than anything science related, and would love to do humanities/liberal arts research professionally. That said, I think some of the problem is the mindset STEM people are kinda forced into -- one solution, and it has to be a scientific one. It makes the whole world boil down into an engineering problem, and anyone who doesn't like it/doesn't agree can be damned because "look at what science has done"/