Recently I went to a product manager interview.
They asked a few questions, for which I gave the answers. But eventually one interviewer asked extremely trivial questions i.e. first year of graduation questions - How does the wifi router work? How does DNS work? How does internet work? These questions are so generic, trivial and basic but at the same time, nobody can remember everything. These questions do not require you to use your logic either. It is a simple memory based question. But since I wrote the answers to these questions over 10 years ago, it is impossible for me to remember them. I understood the bias at play here, but I could not give a name to it. There might be multiple fallacies or biases at play here. Can you please help me pin point them?
You can't decide whether or not someone made a reasoning error by engaging in an action without understanding the goals that the person has for engaging in that action. The goals are part of his mind and the fallacy in which you engage by assuming you know the goals is mind reading.
You seem to treat the situation like you are the first person whom the interviewer asked those questions. In most cases that's not true and the fact that your friend faced the same questions is evidence for it not being true. You should expect that the interviewer knows the kind of answers the average interviewee gives to the question.
The situation isn't similar at all. In the case of Henry Ford the question is whether there's coherent concept of ignorance under which Ford as a single individual can shown to be ignorant. It's also not a situation where people get ranked against each other based on their ability to deal with the same questions.
That said, the case of Henry Ford was a win for everybody involved. Ford got publicity, the newspapers had a good story to sell and had a judgement of 6 cents against them and didn't have to pay Ford the 1 million in libel that Ford was asking for.