Is the President locked in the Iron Cage of the Dunning-Kruger Effect?

President Obama knows more about Judaism than any other president in history:

President Obama met yesterday with "about 20 Conservative Jewish community leaders, thanking them for the work they do to improve communities around the country and discussed their shared commitment to rebuilding the U.S. economy," Haaretz reports.

In the meeting, Obama reportedly boasted about his knowledge of Judaism, telling the leaders that he thinks he knows more "about Judaism" than all past presidents. He said he gained this knowledge of Judaism from reading.

"Obama ... stressed he probably knows about Judaism more than any other president, because he read about it," Haaretz reports. "[He] wondered how come no one asks Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner or Senate minority leader Mitch McConnel [sic] about their support to Israel."

He is also the right guy to handpick the targets for drone strike because he has studied Aquinas and Augustine:

But the most disturbing aspect of the latest NYT insider’s account of the war on terrorism, no doubt timed to shore up Candidate Obama’s national-security credentials for his re-election campaign, is the selection process for drone targets. Apparently President Obama personally selects the targets and approves each operation. This is both an incredible misuse of presidential time and a serious distortion of proper war management. Does no one remember the problems created when Lyndon Johnson took a similar hand in the Vietnam war? First, this president has no military background or expertise that would make him particularly good at this, meaning that he is likely to make errors of commission (picking the wrong targets) and omission (not hitting the right targets). Second, the Defense Department and the CIA will become excessively responsive to Obama’s agenda, which will predictably conflict with the best intelligence and military judgment. Third, a President’s micromanagement of targeting will draw his attention to tactical issues and away from the more important strategic issues — which is unintentionally revealed several times in the Times piece.

Lastly, if President Obama is picking targets, and has no military background or experience, one is left to ask what criteria the president does use. The laughable answer given in the Times piece is that Obama is a student of Aquinas and Augustine and Catholic just-war theory. I hate to say it, but I wonder whether this was proffered because of the Obama administration’s terrible relations with Catholics right now, because I saw no signs in the article that Obama is in the least bit familiar with Catholic just-war theory, and his background of teaching and practicing civil-rights and constitutional law in Chicago would never have exposed him to it. As someone who has spent some time reading, thinking, and even (right now) writing about Catholic just-war theory, it could actually lead to a much broader use of drones than Obama contemplates (which is the opposite of the article’s thrust) or it is just irrelevant to the modern just-war theory. But in either case, the idea that Obama is applying Catholic just-war theory to pick out drone targets is simply not believable or deeply mistaken.

Here is the New York Times source material:

Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s image and derail diplomacy.

It seems like the Nobel Prize winning "world's smartest guy" is well within the gravitational pull of the Dunning-Kruger Effect:

"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it." The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority."

To translate, if you think you are smart, you probably aren't, but if you don't think you are smart, you have a 50/50 chance of being wrong.