The Nurses I provide IT support for are by no means stupid, but critical thinking skills? Nope. There's isn't a piece of Woo-Woo nonsense the majority of them don't believe. They openly hock essential oils to each other, chat about their horoscopes, they are all super-religious within a rounding error, and most skew conservative politically.
Because they have skills, not knowledge. They can run perform (often complicated) procedures but they have no understanding of any biological process working.
It's why they are such... challenging users to provide IT support. They "know" in the absolute loosest terms how to perform route, memorized steps on a computer, but they don't know how a computer works enough to actually "use" a computer in any meaningful sense of the term.
I'd wager we see the same thing with Engineers. I'd put money on the table that the ones who sling the most woo are the ones who work in the most applied parts of engineering.
But the simple title of "Engineer" or "Nurse" gives them an air of authority to a broader discipline they might not have earned.
This.
My official title is 'Quality and Purchasing Administrator', but it really means, 'Person Who Can Apply Critical Thinking and Data Analysis' (including work in the material labs and writing reports/running data for them, I literally have THREE desks). Some of the terms are different but a LOT of the process of auditing a process or documentation is getting people with full on Master's Degrees (and two Dr.) in Engineering to
apply critical thinking. One Packaging Engineer, good kid and actually pretty bright, I needed to explain three times that he had to conduct testing on the current packaging before testing the changes he made
because he didn't have control data to compare the change to. I have to
constantly explain that I can't give them their data analysis back in a normal distribution
because the data didn't fit a normal distribution (and yes, I know several of the transformations that can be applied but usually they shouldn't be used on the data I'm running for many reasons, the primary being the sets tend to be small).
Getting them to
document their changes is hard enough, getting them to
explain their reasoning can be pulling teeth. Electrical Engineers tend to be the worst in my experience. They DON'T KNOW the 'why', they just know the math.
Hell, two of the directors were impressed as hell when I advocated for a specific test of materials because it yielded direct empirical data on the strength of sample brazing over another test that relied on proxy data to infer the strength, and were even more impressed that I used such 'proper' terms. These gentlemen work with full on Engineers who didn't catch which test was better and didn't know the word 'inference'.
And to bring this back on topic, that's how a lot of Trump supports mentally model the world to work. Truth isn't determined by analysis of the evidence, but on personal authority. 'I'm an Engineer, and I'm right.' 'I'm a nurse, so I know health.' 'I'm a great business man and I have the best words.' 'I support Trump so he must be right.'
People otherwise capable of performing tasks that generally need keen intelligence who downright
refuse to apply that ability outside a narrow range.
