This applies to many (though certainly not all) of those students with quantitative backgrounds in engineering and the like. Once they reach a rank where they can’t be called on it, they will happily indulge their every cockeyed notion and bypass relevant quantitative and logical constraints.

I have seen the same thing happen to myself at times. I start to trust my intuition about certain kinds of models or processes ancillary to my main point and get sloppy about drawing conclusions. Of course, I know I’m going to face peer review, so I eventually find the counterargument or counterexample that refutes the error (I think!), but I can readily see how it’s easy to become lazy if you aren’t going to get called on it.

In my management consultancy life, the really big problem with lack of quant. skills was not among marketers, but among the officers of corporations (all Fortune 500s), most of whom had trained as engineers, and all of whom had MBAs from places like HBS. These guys manage-by-anecdote: “I was talking to a friend at the golf club yesterday, and he said he could never got cellphone coverage at location X, so put the engineering department on it right away.” No matter that the engineering department already had a long list of priorities, developed with marketing, to fix the coverage holes of most importance to customers, and X was not on the list (because rich golfers were not the target segment).

If you’ve not met these guys, this sounds like parody, but it isn’t.