I think it is a better way to phrase it anyway. If you say you are an awesome programmer and since you are awesome your decision to use static typing to get you better compile errors and help your development is right, then people can just argue that you suck. But if you say you suck and static typing allows you to suck less, what are they going to say?

It's pretty widely admitted that languages need to help developers suck less to succeed, see Java removing multiple inheritance, operator overloading, etc. and becoming the premier business language. These were power features that made it easy to shoot yourself (and team members) in the foot.

Think of Odersky's line in the same vein as bwk's "debugging is twice as hard..." line, about not using all your smarts in the code you write.