The George Dantzig case actually isn't a counter-anecdote to the XKCD observation, because Dantzig was already a graduate student in a phd program at a top stat

The George Dantzig case actually isn't a counter-anecdote to the XKCD observation, because Dantzig was already a graduate student in a phd program at a top statistics department when he solved those problems. XKCD isn't criticizing the positive mindset of naive-but-gifted researchers; it's criticizing the attitude of experts in one field that their expertise necessarily gives them unique and powerful insights into solving problems in another field. Perhaps a better counter-anecdote would be all of the mathematicians in the 1950s - 1980s who solved hard program design problems with little or no experience actually programming computers. That really was a counter-example to the XKCD mentality: a bit of mathematics was far more useful than knowing the instruction set of the latest IBM mainframe...