/2 cents -- as if I need a "disclaimer" but the internet being what it is....
The "«we»" that includes the lawyer in question has so little to do with the "«we»" that may include Richard Feynman or Marvin Minsky (and further in the right directions), that you may want to refine your model past the problem of Porphyry and hyper-realism in the universals: that "«we»" is insubstantial. It is not some collective humanity that arrived to non-Euclidean geometry, but a small number of people that had the skills and dealt with the problem intensively.
For clarification of some kind: I homeschooled my twice exceptional --"gifted and (learning) disabled" -- sons and for a time did pro bono professional work for a gifted organization in support of me being the teacher in a private school with two students for some years under California law and designing the custom curriculum for my special-needs sons so as to make it digestible without talking down to them and accommodating their big strengths and big weaknesses at the same time.
My emails were seemingly "popular" for a time on a gifted homeschoolers list and you can blame their enthusiasm for my writing for my habit of blogging to this day, though I have no traction and it makes damn little money and is no doubt basically me wasting my life.
Fortunately, we are all dust in the wind anyway, so I'm sure none of it really matters, but I have Opinions about the poor job we generally do with dealing with other humans, especially short ones under the legal age of majority.
So maybe that gives you some context for my stupid comment. No, I don't care to talk further about any of this really, tbh.
But nobody said it was easy (also because ideas like "to invent the lightbulb is not easy" in that form make little sense), and yet the "right" people - not "«we»" - will probably reach the goal, partially owing to a piece of the "«we»" and largely in spite of a large piece of the "«we»".
Just like some achieved the lightbulb, and some (Columbus) achieved making an egg stand straight on the table while those nearby claimed it was impossible.
Now, the problem in the original context was not about those people able to create a hammer, but about the people unable to use it. The problem here is not about creating intelligence but using it.
But feel free to assume I'm just incompetent. Everyone does, regardless of the evidence to the contrary they see.
We all work together to build the context that allows for this new knowledge to emerge. The individual who uttered the new concept the first time is immaterial: they are an element of a group, and the group gets the credit, in the grand scheme.
The fact that we have extremes, like crackheads or Feynman, doesn't make Feynman isolated in his success, or the crackhead isolated in his failure. And without abject idiocy we wouldnt have brilliance.
that a large number of people cannot count will impede Society, but will not impede Mathematics.
(But not so «curiously»: many people have a bewildering drive towards overusing 'we', hence notes like the above.)
"We" stands for a factually un-simple thing and is best avoided when, for example, it confuses collective work, group work, individual work. If "we have killed the planet" or "we have gone to the moon" have a constructive, productive sense in the context they are uttered, good, otherwise they are rationally meaningless.
That "a structured collective effort facilitated Feynman" is true, that "we achieved Feynman's results" makes sense only under some interpretations.
And when you meet "We have all set fire to national monuments" (Graham Chapman), well some of us have not. And when you meet "We were not so we could not", well that "we" is probably not universal.
There's a very small disclaimer at the bottom that says all those things are your problem.