A supposedly smart engineer type should be smart enough to spot the hole in this argument in their sleep.

"You need flour to make a cake." "I have plenty of flour and it never turned into a cake."

You have observed that it's possible to be educated and unwise.

Any individual may or may not be worth a damn at anything regardless of anything.

But you very rarely arrive at wisdom just by ignorant native intuition. At best some people are naturally well-intentioned, but being well intentioned in ignorance isn't very good. You're just easy for everyone else to manipulate.

It works the other way too. If you want to be effective at abusing and manipulating everyone else, you are a lot more effective at your negative goals if you aren't ignorant.

Basically there is no way to spin it that being ignorant is better than being educated.