[B0btheBuilder]

Even competent people with good training aren't perfect. Competent people make mistakes. You mention bridges, buildings, and ships, all projects built by massive teams of people and stringent processes. These massive teams of people and stringent processes are necessary exactly because people aren't perfect. I'm unclear what you mean by the article focusing on "untrained people", unless you're trying to claim that politicians and newspaper executives are untrained.

[Sharlin]

Making occasional mistakes while applying formal knowledge seems to be qualitatively quite different from making suboptimal decisions because you’re improvising due to lack of such formal knowledge.

In some domains you don’t have a choice; there are too many moving parts, decision making is of necessity based on noisy and incomplete information, the domain is too messy for formal models to be useful. You just have to intuit and improvise. This is more often than not the case when human interactions are involved. Trying to impose engineering solutions to social problems usually ends in disaster.