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punditman says…
“The fundamental cause of the trouble in the modern world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
-- Bertrand Russell, mathematician, Nobel laureate
As an editor, the most frustrating clients I encounter are those who think they're writers — they’re not — and they believe my role is to simply check typos and grammar.
“Just clean it up," they’ll say — when in fact the only solution to make their gibberish palatable for sentient minds is a complete rewrite of their nonsensical word salads.
This client type is no more a writer than I’m a chemical engineer.
The difference is that I know I’m not a chemical engineer. The problem is when we don’t know what we don’t know.
As an occasional tennis coach, I’ve noticed beginners are often the easiest to teach. They’re clean slates, malleable, and they generally listen.
Then there are the “uncoachables.”
The athletic non-tennis player who eagerly arrives from another sport with the idea that mastering tennis will be easy. A poor listener, this player can never understand why they routinely get their ass handed to them 6-0, 6-0, by an old guy with a paunch who slices them into oblivion. The Tennis Gods smile.
Or the (typically) young male player who whales away with heavy topspin but manages to keep the ball in play just thirty percent of the time. When not committing unforced errors, he's busy double faulting away half his serves. Once in awhile he hits a screaming winner, which only feeds his delusions of Wimbledon glory.
Then there’s the long-suffering recreational player who practices incessantly, under the mistaken belief that if they keep “working hard” without correcting their bad habits, somehow they'll get better results. They never do.
In other realms…
There’s the beer league hockey player who stick handles with his head down while blaming his team mates for his errant passes.
The tone deaf “part-time musician” who no one wants to jam with.
The student who arrives late to the group seminar, unprepared, but already “knows everything.”
The Substack writer who…
What’s going on here?
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
Named after psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias where people with limited knowledge, skill or competency in a specific area tend to overestimate their competence. And because they’re unable to recognize their limitations due to a lack of expertise, this leads them to “hold inflated views of their performance and ability.”
The Dunning-Kruger Effect can be sad to witness on an individual level, though it's mainly family and friends who absorb the brunt.
"We’ll just let Paul believe he could have made it to the NHL if not for that bad coach back in Peewee. It makes the post-game pint go down smoothly if you just nod in agreement."
This lack of awareness of one's limitations becomes more noteworthy when it begins to affect the larger community. There’s always someone somewhere running for mayor, who, despite single digit polling numbers, remain resolutely convinced of their forthcoming victory.
Sad perhaps, but fairly innocuous.
When Hubris Meets Geopolitics
It's when Dunning-Kruger hits the global scale that things get seriously and potentially earth shatteringly stupid.
Prussian field marshal Helmuth Von Moltke once observed that: “No operation extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main body of the enemy.”
Did Putin really think when he launched his criminal invasion of Ukraine with just 200,000 troops that its government would collapse in 10 days? With all the death and destruction that war brings, did he think Ukrainians would simply give up?
In his latest Substack piece, Seymour Hersh cites a source inside US intelligence:
“Let’s be clear,” the official said. “Putin did a stupid and self-destructive act in starting the war. He thought he had a magical power and that all that he wanted was going to work out.” Russia’s initial attack, the official added, was poorly planned, understaffed, and led to unnecessary losses. “He was lied to by his generals and began the war with no logistics—no way of resupplying his troops.”
Once it was clear that he got his tit stuck in the ringer, Putin later dismissed many of his generals.
On the other hand, Hersh’s source says:
“Putin did something stupid, no matter how provoked, by violating the UN charter and so did we”— meaning President Biden’s decision to wage a proxy war with Russia by funding Zelensky and his military.“
Did Biden really believe the Russian economy would implode under Western sanctions? That the project of “weakening Russia” will lead to Putin’s demise? Or that, without risking a direct clash between NATO and Russia, that Ukraine can truly “win”?
According to Hersh:
There are significant elements in the American intelligence community, relying on field reports and technical intelligence, who believe that the demoralized Ukraine army has given up on the possibility of overcoming the heavily mined three-tier Russian defense lines and taking the war to Crimea and the four oblasts seized and annexed by Russia. The reality is that Volodymyr Zelensky’s battered army no longer has any chance of a victory.
This goes against the commonly held, dominant narrative and is certainly not good news for Ukraine, the aggrieved party.
However accurate this assessment may be, at the very least the conflict remains a grinding, bloody war of attrition.
But my point is not to analyze its current trajectory, nor its possible end games, another matter altogether. But rather to point out that “overconfidence” and “illusory superiority” are part and parcel of warfare itself.
On February 12, 2002, while addressing the lack of evidence linking Iraq to weapons of mass destruction and terrorists, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld answered a reporter thusly:
“Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.”
Dunning says we should strive to be “good at knowing what we don’t know.”
Rumsfeld was not only bad at knowing what he didn't know, he was even worse at what he thought he knew.
Then, on March 16, 2003, four days before the criminal invasion of Iraq, Dick Cheney went on TV and said: “I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”
No such luck, Dick. As George Carlin would say, "It’s all bullshit, and it's bad for you."
Dunning says we can increase our self-awareness by constantly challenging our own beliefs.
Broadly speaking, governments don't do this — be they run by despots, oligarchs, buffoons or cognitively impaired stand-ins for the establishment.
Governments, as Jeffrey Sachs says, “tell stories.” And the biggest whoppers are those they tell themselves. Not unlike the lowly, talent-challenged soul who believes he’s one step away from the big time, if not for all the land mines placed on his path.
May we work to remove such delusions, in ourselves, and far and wide.
P.S. Kudos to the highly prolific fellow Substacker, Andrew Smith, who inspired me to write on this topic here.
Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed this article and want to encourage Punditman to keep going, you can buy me a coffee below. Every little bit helps!
Hey, I'm glad my piece got some thinking cooking!
I think Putin's isolation during Covid kind of made him even more susceptible to this phenomenon, to the belief that he was invincible. I'm not as convinced that anyone on the US side had any illusions that this would be an easy win for Ukraine, but that's maybe an irrelevant rabbit hole for now. Cheney is a great example, too.
I have a different take on Russia's response to NATO expansion, the American supported 2014 Ukrainian coup and the ensuing civil war deaths of 14,000 mostly Donbas civilians at the hands of 60,000 NATO trained AFU troop, to which Russia finally--after 8 years-- responded with its own 200,000 troops. Because Russia's ensuing invasion was provoked, its criminality is disputable under International Law even though US hegemons (who invaded Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.) consider it criminal according to their "rules based international order". After all, Putin had just been rebuffed in his Dec 21/Jan. 22 peace proposals to protect European and Russian security, reinstate the Intermediate Range Nuclear Arms Treaty walked away from by the US which were dismissed by the NATO leaders invited to consider them in Moscow. Initially Russia's Special Military Operation led to an agreement, reimplementing the Minsk Accords giving the Donbas more autonomy within Ukraine with guaranteed language and cultural freedom. The penciled Istanbul Agreement between Russia and Ukraine was rejected by NATO who sent Boris Johnson to Kiev to pull Zelensky's negotiators out of the agreement. So Russia found that its 200K troops were insufficient given NATO/Ukraine's escalations. Only now is peace on the horizon again but that's because Ukraine is being roundly defeated and NATO support is collapsing. Sadly, Ukraine will now have to capitulate, lose more territory than it would have had to cede had NATO allowed them to sign the earlier agreement.