Aaron Sorkin said it plainly, again, this August: “There has been a glamorization of dumbness.” He was talking to Esquire, for their What I’ve Learned series, and he pointed back to something he’d said almost fifteen years earlier — during the Sarah Palin years, when he wrote that he had “no patience for the glamorization of dumbness.” His own words to Esquire now: that old line “seems quaint” compared to where things actually stand today. (Watch the full interview here.)
I want to sit with that word for a second. Quaint. A man who has spent his career writing rooms full of the smartest people in America talking fast about hard problems is telling us that his fifteen-year-old alarm about anti-intellectualism reads, today, like a gentle warning shot. That should stop you.
But here is where I want to push past Sorkin’s frame, not just repeat it. He is talking about America — its politics, its voters, its relationship with expertise. I don’t think this is an American problem anymore. I think it is a globalized one. And I think the distinction matters, because it changes what you think is actually broken and what you think might fix it.
It was never going to stay in one country
I teach at a business school in Madrid, in classrooms full of students from a dozen countries who grew up on the same handful of platforms. I run a business that has to survive in European supply chains, European regulation, European consumers. And what I see, from that vantage point, is not an American disease with American symptoms. It is a structural incentive that any platform running on engagement will produce, regardless of the language it’s produced in.
The algorithm does not care whether the confident, simple, wrong answer is being posted in English, Spanish, or anything else. It rewards the same thing everywhere: certainty, speed, and a claim short enough to fit in a headline. Nuance does not perform. “It’s complicated, and here are the six variables that actually determine the outcome” does not get shared. “Here is the one thing they don’t want you to know” does.
Sorkin is right that something got glamorized. I just don’t think it respects borders. I have watched the exact same pattern in Spanish political debate, in French elections, in the comment sections under posts about the EU. Different language, same shape. That is what makes it worth calling globalized rather than American — it is not a symptom of one country’s politics. It is a symptom of the infrastructure everyone is now standing on.
The variable nobody wants to read anymore
Regular readers of this blog know where I am going to take this, because I have said some version of it in almost everything I have written here this year: the world does not run on fixed formulas. Two plus two is never reliably four. The actual work — in business, in crisis management, in politics, in life — is learning to read the variables in front of you instead of reaching for a model that worked somewhere else.
Dumbness, glamorized, is the direct enemy of that habit. It is the mass preference for the formula over the variables. For the person who tells you the answer is simple over the person who tells you the answer depends. For the leader who promises certainty over the one who says “here is what we know, here is what we don’t, and here is how we’ll adapt as we learn more” — which is, not coincidentally, the only honest way to manage an actual crisis.
You cannot glamorize dumbness without also demonizing the alternative. That is the part that should worry all of us more than the dumbness itself. It is not just that simple answers are getting louder. It is that complexity, patience, and “I don’t know yet, let me find out” are being read as weakness, as elitism, as somebody looking down their nose at you. Sorkin makes exactly this point about the resentment aimed at anyone who sounds smarter than the room. I see it aimed at anyone who sounds slower than the room, even when slower is correct.
Let me be clear about what I am not saying
Because this is the point where it would be easy to misread me, and I don’t want that. I am not standing here telling you I am smarter than anyone, or more intelligent, or somehow exempt from the dumbness I am describing. I am not. I wish I were smarter than I am, most days.
What I am actually arguing for is narrower than that, and I think harder to disagree with. We need smart people. We need credentials, expertise, people who have put in the years — not because they are better human beings, but because that is how you get trust in decision-making that is coherent, efficient, and right, instead of decision-making that is loud, fast, and wrong. Or, if that sounds too tidy: at the very least, we should all be demanding the higher common denominator instead of settling for the lower one — in our leaders, our institutions, our own thinking — for the decisions that turn out good and the ones that turn out bad alike. Not because a higher standard guarantees the right outcome. Because it is still the only real answer I have found to “how do we get more decisions right more often.” Not “trust me, I’m smart.” Trust the process that smart, credentialed, accountable people build and keep checking — because a good process outlives any one person’s cleverness. Including mine.
What it costs a classroom
I feel this most directly with students. A rising number of them arrive genuinely uncomfortable with uncertainty — not because they are less capable than students a decade ago, but because almost everything in their information diet has trained them to expect a confident answer within one scroll. Ask them to sit inside a genuinely ambiguous case, one where the “right” call depends on eight variables that are all moving at once, and you can watch the discomfort in real time. They want the formula. I am trying to teach them there isn’t one.
That is not a complaint about a generation. It is a description of what a culture of glamorized dumbness actually produces at the point of impact: people who have been rewarded, over and over, for confident simplicity, walking into a world that runs on ambiguous complexity. The gap between those two things is where crises are born.
What it costs a business
I built Jolufoods across two decades of markets that never once behaved the way the previous five years suggested they would. Every real business decision I have ever made well came from reading the actual conditions in front of me, not from applying someone else’s playbook. Every one I got wrong came from wanting a shortcut — wanting the formula to exist so I wouldn’t have to do the harder work of reading the variables myself.
A culture that glamorizes dumbness sells that shortcut at scale. It sells the five-step framework, the one growth hack, the guru with the universal answer, to people who are exhausted and would very much like the complexity to not be real. I understand the appeal. I have felt the appeal. But the shortcut is never actually a shortcut. It just moves the cost of not doing the reading from now to later, and later it arrives as a crisis instead of a decision.
Why I’m not going to make this simpler than it is
I could end this piece with a five-point list of what to do about it. That would perform better. It would also be a small act of the exact thing I am arguing against.
So instead: I don’t think the fix is a format. I think it is a posture. It is choosing, deliberately and repeatedly, to be the person in the room who says “it’s more complicated than that” even when the room would rather you didn’t. It is refusing to let a platform’s incentives become your own standard for what counts as a good answer. It is staying curious about the boring, unglamorous six variables instead of reaching for the one dramatic explanation — which, not coincidentally, is the same instinct I wrote about a few weeks ago when I admitted I can’t stop falling down rabbit holes over things that don’t matter to anyone but me. That instinct is not a personality flaw in a culture like this one. It might be the actual antidote.
Sorkin says he has no patience for the glamorization of dumbness. Neither do I. I’d just add: it isn’t America’s alone to fix, because it was never America’s alone to have. It’s everyone’s, everywhere, who has ever chosen the confident wrong answer over the honest complicated one.
I’d rather be right and slow than loud and wrong. I think that’s still a minority position. I don’t think it should be.
Ricardo Jovani teaches Crisis Management, Operations & Supply Chain, and Family Business Management at Geneva Business School Madrid. He is the founder of Jolufoods S.L., author of The TriCore Method and the forthcoming 2+2 Is Never 4, and a TEDx speaker.
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