@blatham,
I have had a great deal of experience leading large organizations composed of well educated people and many others with a good deal less formal education. This has included Naval Aircraft squadrons with 20 or so officer aviators and around 300 enlisted men who maintained our 15 aircraft; ships with crews as large as 5,800 men , and later corporations staffed by engineers, geologists, physicists and construction staff - all numbering up to 10,000 people.
From them I have learned that when it comes to the evaluation of immediate challenges and the general self-interest, all were about equal in their proficiency. Indeed the central element of demonstrated wisdom in problem solving had much more to do with the direct involvement of those involved with the challenge before them than any level of education and refinement present (or absent) in them, while those of a more intellectual persuasion often missed otherwise obvious elements of reality in their habitual abstractions.
Once, just a couple of weeks before a scheduled Westpac deployment, I got short notice orders to take the carrier and a reduced Battle Group on a route across the Bearing Sea (near the Pribilof islands) instead of the usual route by Hawaii and across the Central Pacific - in February ! Evidently the Fleet Commander's intent was to spook the Soviets by demonstrating we could (in electronic silence) approach their Kamchatka Peninsula bases undetected from an unlikely route. Unfortunately there was no book showing how we could operate aluminum aircraft from an ice covered steel flight deck in Arctic sea conditions. I immediately checked the DoD library for reports of previous Arctic operations and found only material from our WWII Aleutians campaign - I recall reading about our 1942 invasion of Adak in which we were surprised to find that the Japanese had left a month earlier but we still took 500 casualties. Not very encouraging, so I commissioned a bunch of officers to study the problem and come up with a concrete plan of action for flight deck air operations before we got underway. The day came and went, and no plan had yet emerged, As we sailed North West across the Gulf of Alaska, with the seas getting rougher and the air colder and wetter, each day, I continued pressuring my group of officers for a plan, and intently watched our ongoing flight deck operations from the Bridge Soon after we crossed through the Aleutians I realized that the 20 year old sailors on the flight deck had, in a hundred different improvised actions, found the needed solution. For example hey were towing an A-6 aircraft, with its nose wheel elevated. around the flight deck with its jet engines running at idle - a marvelous and immediately effective flight deck deicer ! This and many other such improvisations enabled us to fuel, arm and taxi aircraft to the catapults, launch them and later recover them on an ice free landing zone. I told my officers to get their asses out on the flight deck and write down what the sailors were doing - that would be their plan.
We made it safely across, launching fighters along the way to intercept Soviet aircraft 400 miles south looking for us below the Aleutians; slipped down through the Komandorski islands to a position abeam the Soviet base at Petropavlovsk, and turned everything on; getting the expected response in a large flight of Badger & Blinder aircraft immediately launched to intercept us. (One could never be sure that, at some level, they weren't fooled).
My point here is that ordinary people are usually very good at finding solutions to problems immediately before them, and usually a good deal better than are their educated educated "betters" theorizing from abstract and distant perches.
In a similar way I've learned from my gardener that he has a better understanding of the economic issues facing our working class than has the esteemed Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren, and he is far less prone to exaggerated absurdities.
I believe The Athenian Themistocles learned similar lesson in building the Athenian triremes and training their crews before the battle with the Persians at Salamis
