The bet­ter cal­cu­la­tors among you may want to con­sider using the phrase “bound­edly ratio­nal” when speak­ing to peo­ple who you might oth­er­wise be tempted to call “stupid”.

For best effect in a given social sit­u­a­tion, you should deter­mine the rel­a­tive strengths of each of the two approaches by (1) cre­at­ing func­tions describ­ing the social costs, emo­tional ben­e­fits, and energy out­lay of using each term, (2) pro­ject­ing these func­tions out to an infi­nite time hori­zon, and (3) inte­grat­ing beneath the curves. You may want to dis­count each term’s util­ity on the basis of the rel­a­tive com­pu­ta­tional effort expended. The num­ber and reac­tion of peo­ple you have not yet met should be mod­eled by a sim­ple mix­ing model based on the peo­ple you already know — but then that should be obvious.

The term with the high­est net util­ity is the win­ner, of course!

For addi­tional jus­ti­fied tact, pair­wise analy­ses of mul­ti­ple alter­na­tives such as “moron” or “pedant” may be exam­ined, but it is unclear whether the sequen­tial expen­di­ture of com­pu­ta­tional effort on mul­ti­ple pair­wise com­par­isons calls for a dis­count sched­ule or may sim­ply be ignored for par­tic­u­larly quick-​​witted speakers.

[And, no, I’m not allowed to say what I’m mak­ing fun of. It wouldn’t be tactful.]