I am going to try to divert your minds away towards some questions that you might not be interested in, but nonetheless could be more productive than the game of hole-poking that this essay invites.

I think many readers will have arrived at a similar set of conclusions, based on whatever assertions or citations may have inspired doubt; for me, it was Pearce's surprise that the world was unable to feed everyone despite having full agricultural production. Perhaps I have greatly misunderstood the matter, but I had believed that problems of famine and chronic hunger were entirely due localized logistic and political problems, and that the world was in fact handily capable of feeding everyone, even with the current (very inefficient) distribution and scale of agricultural production.

This suggests to me that either I am very wrong --- something that does happen --- or that Pearce and Denkenburger might not have done a lot of what one could term 'peripheral' research on the topic they were interested in. This is a situation where two engineers are attempting to problem solve in a domain that might require, at any given turn, significant expertise in chemical or biological processes; or manufacturing processes, for that matter, or logistics, or economics, or international commerce.

Consequently, this comes across as what one might term a 'Dunning-Krueger Study': facile, misinformed "solutions" to misunderstood problems in which the progenitor has an erroneous confidence. Given my own lack of knowledge, it would be hypocritical to label it thusly; the deposition of their suggestions should be placed in the hands of the various relevant domains.

My question is regarding this type of research in general. I imagine the defence of it would be that it (at least) initiates investigation and problem solving, and that it (at least) arrives at useful suggestions, preliminary analyses, and approximate solutions. Does the Dunning-Kruger phase of knowledge have a discernible utility or application? Is there in fact a use or place for such investigations? Are they a form of deceptive mimesis, imitating research in pursuit of resources? Does ignorance of the domain of knowledge ever have a value? If so, how does one identify that one is in a Dunning-Krueger situation, and how should one proceed from there? Can one have knowledge about the meta-domain of Dunning-Krueger situations that allows one to limit or avoid the negative consequences of misjudgement?

It strikes me that perhaps situations analogous to the one in which a hypothetical Peirce and Denkenburger are required to figure out how to feed the entire world after an apocalyptic event are not in fact rare, but actually occur all the time, and that it is a routine problem in design and engineering that one needs to find solutions in a problem domain that one understands poorly or not at all. I have no expertise to support this notion; there is a question mark hanging on the end of the assertion. But one could regard this as occurring in the course of ordinary life as well. How does one systematically make the best possible decisions on the basis of incomplete and possibly erroneous information, given that computation is itself a cost? In that context, a Dunning-Krueger epistemology starts to look like a reasonable strategy.