Back To The Dunning-Kruger Effect

I had drafts for a couple of other posts prepared and ready to go today, but almost as soon as I put yesterday's post up, President Brandon let me know I wasn't done:

He came, he saw, he confused.

Joe Biden’s call-to-arms speech in Poland was long on soaring rhetoric about the virtues of democracy but woefully short on what more the West will do to help Ukraine defeat the Russian invasion. But by the time he got to the finish, most of that was forgotten.

What mattered most and what will be remembered for a long time was a single line the president of the United States said about the president of Russia: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

In the context of the speech and the slaughter of Ukrainian civilians, it’s impossible to understand that line as anything other than a call for regime change, a move that would dramatically raise the stakes with Russia at a time when Biden has been at pains to lower them.

I'm actually of two minds about this. President Trump was actually far more belligerent in his public challenges to renegade world leaders:

The US president used Kim Jong-un’s New Year’s Day speech as the basis for his latest provocative tweet against the leader, whom he has previously referred to as “little rocket man”, saying the “nuclear button” in Washington is “much bigger and more powerful” than Kim’s – “and my button works!”.

It seems as though some people were even encouraged to see this tone from Biden:

President Joe Biden stunned pundits and politicians on Saturday when, at the end of a fiery speech in Warsaw, he seemed to endorse regime change in Russia, saying Vladimir Putin “cannot remain in power.”

His speech caused a huge reaction, particularly among members of the media and public figures in areas of foreign policy and politics. That included a lot of people on social media comparing his commentary to Ronald Reagan’s historic “Tear Down This Wall” speech in Berlin in June of 1987.

, , , If it isn’t clear which part of the speech the verified users were reacting to, it was spelled out explicitly several times. They were reacting very directly to his saying that Putin cannot remain in power, which was widely discussed as meaning a call for regime change.

. . . However, after the White House walked that back, attempting to clarify that Biden meant Putin shouldn’t have power over neighboring countries, there were doubts about the comparison to Reagan’s speech. Some, like reporter Mark Knoller and pundit Larry Sabato, specifically moderated their own praise in concert with the White House response.

(Apparently, though, nobody saw any parallels to "my button is much bigger".) The bottom line here is that Biden seems to have decided off the cuff to depart from the teleprompter and insert his own version of "tear down this wall" without giving it much thought -- indeed, without giving it any more thought than he'd give to anything else. The difference here is that "tear down this wall" was written for Reagan (by a speechwriter who's built an entire subsequent career on having written it), and clearly the text was approved up the chain of command before Reagan delivered it.

Even "my button is much bigger" had some level of deliberation on Trump's part (or on the part of whomever else was at his side) before he sent the tweet. And of course, it worked; Kim immediately ended his nuclear bombast. The problem for Biden is that however justifiable and potentially effective his ad lib may have been, his staff was not on board with it, and they walked it back. Nobody who worked for Trump walked back the tweet about the button.

I realized early this morning that I've already posted about Biden and the Dunning-Kruger effect. According to Britannica,

Dunning-Kruger effect, in psychology, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general. According to the researchers for whom it is named, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the effect is explained by the fact that the metacognitive ability to recognize deficiencies in one’s own knowledge or competence requires that one possess at least a minimum level of the same kind of knowledge or competence, which those who exhibit the effect have not attained. Because they are unaware of their deficiencies, such people generally assume that they are not deficient, in keeping with the tendency of most people to “choose what they think is the most reasonable and optimal option.”

As I noted yesterday, Biden has fequently made remarks dismissive of reporters' assumptions, as when he's insisted throughout the Russo-Ukraine War that he never intended for sanctions to deter Putin, even as his administration has repeatedly said it relies on them on the basis that they do. We must assume that Biden's national security handlers had been working on the assumption that he would not make remarks outside expected unprovocative parameters, when instead, without giving it any thought, he did so.

If this were Reagan or Trump (especially Reagan), the remarks would have been fully calculated; in the case of Trump, they carried a level of instinctive confidence that also turns out to have been justified. With Biden, they were sponanteous empty bombast that carried the extra disadvantage of needing "clarification".

Again, this is not a medical issue, and the Dunning-Kruger effect is not a medical condition. The issue is that Biden is so ignorant he doesn't know what stupid is. This is dangerous. Should this man remain in power?