At the time where the hand washing conflict happened there wasn't much of evidence-based medicine. Today there is some evidence for checklists improving medical outcomes but they don't get easily adopted. I think there's decent evidence that combining hypnosis and anesthetic drugs is an improvement over just using anesthetic drugs.

This is all true, but it's a rather far jump from here to 'and a culture permeated by Eastern philosophy handles this better, controlling for the myriad unrelated differences, and accounting for whatever advantages Western philosophy may or may not have.'

I think the ability to be suprised by the right things is reasonably called knowledge and not only behavior.

I agree.

According to Google some of their programmers are 10x as productive as the average.

Google hires programmers who are already 10x as productive as the average. It doesn't hire average programmers and train them to be 10x as productive using checklists or anything else. Maybe it hires programmers 9x as productive as the average and then helps them improve, but that's a lot harder to measure than a whole order of magnitude improvement.

Can a decidated software engineering major teach the knowledge to be required to reach that level reliably? I don't think so. I don't think it even get's 2x.

If you're asking whether there exist two different institutions with software engineering majors, where the graduates of one are 2x as good as those of the other, or 2x better than the industry average, then the answer is clearly yes.

If you're asking the same, but want to control for incoming freshman quality (i.e. measure the actual improvement due to teaching), then you hit the problem that there are no RCTs and there's no control group (other than those who don't go to college at all). There's also no way to make two test groups of college students not learn anything 'on the side' from the Internet or from their friends, or to do so in the same way. So it's really hard to measure anything on the scale of a whole major.

Lots of people have measured interventions on the scale of a single course. Some of them may help (like typing); in fact I hope some of them do help, otherwise the whole major would only give you credentials. I'm not disputing this, but I also don't see the relation between there being some useful skills that aren't explicit knowledge (in this case they're motor skills everyone has explicit knowledge about) and a grand difference between societal or philosophical differences.