Devastatingly good? Meh. It's okay, until it runs off the tracks and starts making massive over-generalizations, and ends up mired in populist propaganda (i.e. "carpenters" being problem-solvers, whereas "academics" are not). By that point, it's rubbish -- a victim of the same sort of lazy, pattern-based thinking that it's trying to critique.
I think the hypothesis proposed might have some merit: most people can (and do) get by without the need for strong analytical skills. Beyond that, I think it's probably a stretch to try to match those skills to certain professions, when it's far more reasonable to expect that any random sample of people (taken from any profession) will fall on a continuum of analytical prowess (just as with any other metric). For all we know, "problem solving" is the trait that distinguishes the top performers in any field from the rest of the crowd.
> a victim of the same sort of lazy, pattern-based thinking that it's trying to critique.
Over generalization based on incomplete data or biased vision of the world has nothing to do with the problem solving/memorization dichotomy the author is speaking about. In fact, (and this is a big generalization) problem solvers have a tendency to reduce every problem to its simplest forms in order to find new ways to analyze it. I'd agree that when it is applied to human/social world, it often leads to partially or even totally wrong hypotheses though.
I'd also like people to stop just dissing over generalizations where in fact we just use these all the time. This comment is not meant to be a "end of discussion by scientific proof" about anything. But it's doing an extremely good job opening a new interresting way to see the world we have around us as intellectuals. And that's what generalizations are for.
I think the hypothesis proposed might have some merit: most people can (and do) get by without the need for strong analytical skills. Beyond that, I think it's probably a stretch to try to match those skills to certain professions, when it's far more reasonable to expect that any random sample of people (taken from any profession) will fall on a continuum of analytical prowess (just as with any other metric). For all we know, "problem solving" is the trait that distinguishes the top performers in any field from the rest of the crowd.