I know and have dealt with very highly educated and intelligent people who just can’t do proper thorough problem evaluation and solving, and I don’t mean just hands on practical things, I mean obtaining information, thinking a situation through and coming out with an explanation and possible solutions.

I think it’s really a question of practice in Analytical Reasoning, which people in STEM have lots of because that’s what those domains require (try designing a bridge using persuasion techniques from Business Management and see what happens) so they constantly practice it, but most other areas don’t so people there have little practice in that mode or reasoning (but lots of practice in other ways of thinking).

You see it here tons of times: people who clearly are intelligent and educated arguing via semantics, appeals to emotion and just about a ton of falacies, all of which are noticeable as obviously flawed in logical terms with just a tiny bit of analytical thinking.

One thing I learned from my period of contact with the Theatre world some years ago (pretty much the opposite of what I do for a living), is that there are many ways of being highly intelligent (it was quite suprising for me the intelligence required to be a good actor) and maybe is better not to judge or, worse, to presume.