People Act Like Morons – Its Only Logical

My buddy Steve sent me a link to this incredibly long and wordy post on Substack. It’s a great article, though the author didn’t practice any form of conservation of words. (Not that I am here either…) If I was to try to badly summarize the whole thing in one sentence, it’d be this:

Populism is what happens when human intuition rises up against academic style analysis – and social media gave it a megaphone.

The one thing I’m uncomfortable with in the discussion is that it attempts to reframe “populism” as a strategy, as opposed to a political ideology. Personally, I don’t understand why it needs to be defined as either. In fact, I don’t like the word at all. I feel like it was made up and not well defined. I think it’s an over-complicated, unnecessary and over-pretentious word… an Inkhorn term. So if you’ve never really been clear about what the definition of Populism is – you’re not alone. No one can agree.

We Don’t Need a Word For This

F the word populism. Let’s just talk about the concept of people basically being stupid. Why are they stupid? Well, first of all I’ve addressed the problems related to cognitive bias – but those can be trained out of people with just a little awareness. There’s also the Dunning-Kruger effect, but that just basically states that uneducated people think they know more than they do. That’s not what makes you stupid.

In a nutshell: I feel like people are stupid – because it makes sense to be that way!

The best way for me to try and explain what I mean is to point the spotlight at AI. If you’ve spent any time with ChatGPT, Gemini, or other AIs, you know that when you ask it a question it will usually give you a lightning quick response. At first glance it seems impressive! But if you really wanted some good information, what it gives you is just fluff. That’s because it holds a certain amount of basic information “in memory”, which it can access and regurgitate quickly and with minimal energy expended. But if you want more, it has to actually go do some work! It needs to start surfing the web, cataloging more information, organizing it, “think” about it, etc.

If 99% of the time the fast initial query it provides is all people need, it wouldn’t make sense to burn all that other time and energy over-researching stuff! In fact, we’d all get pissed waiting around forever for it to respond. We want FAST! We want NOW!!!

If it applies to Artificial Intelligence running on computers, why would the same phenomenon not apply to Actual Intelligence running on biological computers (ie – our brains)?

Cognitive Efficiency Theory (An Alternative to “Populism”)

I’d like to propose a different way of looking at this. I don’t think populism adequately defines what’s going on. I think it’s a great word for politicians and reporters who want to weaponize a natural phenomenon.

The Concept

• What’s being labeled populism isn’t really about ideology or manipulation. It’s a manifestation of cognitive efficiency.
• Humans (and AIs) are optimization engines, not truth engines.
• We conserve energy by defaulting to low-cost processing, “satisficing”, instead of maximizing understanding. This isn’t laziness; it’s rational efficiency with constrained resources. We only really try and think hard, when the easy thinking isn’t working.

You could call this “cognitive economy” or “adaptive minimalism.” But I think it’s the default way the human brain works, all day – every day – not because it’s a political strategy, or because it’s mentally “easier”. It’s just rational biology.

An analogy I would give would be that current PCs often employ two video cards. Yeah, most people don’t know this… but the main computer processor has a little video card built in which is great for most easy stuff. But when you need to do something hard like video editing, or gaming, or 3D modeling, the processor offloads that work to a big dedicated video card. It’s perfectly efficient.

The Parallel With AI

Just like an AI language model:

• Humans are trained on patterns.
• We generate first-pass responses that are “good enough” for most contexts.
• Only when challenged or given incentives do we invoke high-cost, deep reasoning.

This is precisely what “System 1 vs. System 2” describes in that article I mentioned at the beginning (which you probably didn’t read), but Kahneman framed it behaviorally, not economically. The real driver is energy cost: analytical reasoning consumes more metabolic power and attention, so the brain evolved to avoid it unless necessary.

You can model this as a utility function:

If expected payoff < cognitive cost, System 1 (“common sense”) dominates.
If expected payoff ≥ cost, System 2 (“academic research”) activates.

In both humans and AIs, efficiency thresholds determine the depth of reasoning.

Imagine if food sources are bountiful. People would just walk around picking it up and eating it. If you can’t find any food, you start working at it – learning to hunt, or farm. But we default to what’s easiest because it’s the most efficient.

Why This Matters Socially

What’s being misinterpreted as “anti-elite populism” is often just friction between two efficiency regimes:

• Cognitive high-spenders: (the educated elite) invest mental effort easily, often because they’re paid or rewarded for it.
• Cognitive minimalists: (the majority) run leaner, faster, cheaper.

Neither is stupid or lazy. They’re simply optimizing differently.

Conflict arises when high-spenders design systems (bureaucracy, academia, policy) that demand costly reasoning from everyone else, essentially forcing inefficiency on people who can’t afford it mentally, emotionally, or temporally. That tension produces resentment that feels political but is actually energetic.

Implications

If this framing is correct:

• Modern life’s complexity is basically a cognitive tax on ordinary people.
• Technocratic elites make the world more complex, forcing everyone else to function in it.
• Populist anger isn’t ignorance, it’s cognitive revolt against systemic inefficiency forced upon them.
• And AIs will increasingly reflect and reinforce these same efficiency biases unless explicitly trained otherwise.

Meanwhile we’ll all go through life attempting to conserve as much mental energy as possible at all times.

Final Thought

What we call “populism” is just cognitive energy economics – minds and machines optimizing for least effort.

If you want to read the article that started all of this discussion, here’s Keith Stanovich’s original: Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking that Tests Miss. And his other work on Google Scholar.