PG's "most" includes more than I'm comfortable with, which is why I wrote the essay -- to defend those parts of the subject that I thought were unfairly called a waste of time.
My "most," in other words, includes less than his.
Abel, 1824. Not Galois, 1829. Your favorite joke a bout proto-emo math geeks here.
Also, while I'm sympathetic to the intent of this essay -- easy criticism of the humanities goes back to Aristophanes -- it falls flat because it reads like a philosophy paper. A philosophy paper written in defense of academic philosophy is going to lose in the gut regardless of how correct it is to the reasoning mind (this is also why we still love Aristophanes).
Your "most" is, I would say, just an application of Sturgeon's Law, which, like a sort of Thermodynamics of Information, gives a sort of comfortable minimum to the amount of value you can extract from any field of inquiry.
My "most," in other words, includes less than his.