Reading the title of this article, I immediately thought of William S. Gosset, "The Guinness Brewer Who Revolutionized Statistics", earlier in the century. I am sure there are even older examples.
Interesting, that's the chapter that caused me to finally put the book down. The gist of it was: people not thoroughly trained in statistics aren't good at it.
This is hardly news. In fact, even highly intelligent people struggle with the Monty Hall problem, for instance.