I found your history very interesting (I was familiar with much of it but I don't think I've seen so much collected in one place) but I had some issues with your conclusion, mostly because I don't really see the phrase "cargo cult" or the verbed form "cargo culting" to be inherently pejorative. I think the concept of someone going through the motions without a necessary understanding of their purpose to achieve the desired effects is very useful one, especially given the ever increasing layers of abstraction that exist in our society.
Have you thought about an alternative concept or word that describes this phenomenon that could be used instead?
> Have you thought about an alternative concept or word that describes this phenomenon that could be used instead?
I think "magical thinking" would be an appropriate term for what Feynman characterizes.
However, one of the post's important points is that we're not even using Feynman's mischaracterized explanation of cargo cults: it's become a generic negative descriptor for anything the user considers insufficiently justified, even if the underlying rationale is not "magical."
Clearing an airstrip isn't magical thinking though, you'd need to do that for planes to land. It's just not sufficient, because the planes also need to want to land there. I don't think magical thinking covers that same concept.
It appears that there are some people (like you and the post author) that are constantly confronted with someone screaming "cargo cult", which has to be exhausting. But it's absolutely not the world others live in. In my world, it comes up every now and then (I'd guess every 3-4 months), and I've experienced it multiple times that I mention it and the other person hadn't heard it before but absolutely LOVED the term after an explanation because it describes certain behaviors so well.
The magical thinking in the case of the airstrip is the lack of a causative connection: you need to clear the airstrip for the plane to land, but clearing an airstrip does not make a plane land.
Or in other words, magical thinking doesn't imply the lack of a conceptual connection: airstrips and planes landing are definitely conceptually connected. Magical thinking is the drawing of illogical causative connections from conceptual ones.
(I don't run into "cargo cult" that often. But I think TFA is a great writeup of why it's not the best term; as engineers, I think we should aspire to use the best terms available to us.)
Magical thinking explicitly lacks the connection -- that's why it's magical after all. Jupiter and Mars are aligned, therefore I missed my bus, that sort of thing.
That's not what I usually encounter. I see people imitating something they've seen others do (who appear to be successful) without understanding the full concept. Their efforts are in vain because clearing the brush for an airstrip doesn't make the planes land, and neither does one deliver projects more successfully by changing nothing except asking everyone to join a daily meeting each morning.
Magical thinking is a bit different than cargo-culting. Magical thinking is the belief that unrelated events are causally connected. For example, "I survived the car crash because I had my lucky charm in my backpack".
Cargo-culting is the belief that specific best practices which are causally connected to an outcome in one context will produce those outcomes in other contexts where the chain of causal reasoning no longer holds. For example, "I survived the car crash because I was wearing a seatbelt. Now I'll install a seatbelt on my bicycle too."
Cargo-culting is an important concept in its own right in the tech industry, because those best practices do get often blindly shared, recommended and even enforced into codes and standards, even when the context that made them a good idea is lost. Without a concept like "cargo-culting" to label the fallacy, it can be hard to argue against that proposal, because the side recommending the change has lots of out-of-context data in their favor. For example, "car-crash survival rates are much higher when drivers are wearing seatbelts. Therefore, we're now requiring bicycles and motorbikes to have seatbelts."
I read the whole history and it only affirms my belief that the phrase is spot on. I'm not concerned of its pop culture origin, etc.
Look, these people were seriously believing some ridiculous junk. Most Europeans once believed some ridiculous junk. There's millennia old ridiculous junk still being believed. It's all "cargo cult".
I always found the use of the phrase mildly racist and an easy low effort way to take someone down.
Thank you for the amazing thoroughness in your research. I just read aloud the entire article with my kid. So many tributaries of history and science to explore later.
Things that I referenced in our discussion about this article.
How slang, and low fluency spread from person to person can create divergent dialects.
The apocryphal story of cutting the pot roast to fit the pan. How things start true but get transformed through transcription errors. The main theme and the message may be retained, but the specifics get jumbled up.
well written and interesting. although i really do love the technical deep dives.
i am fond of using the cargo-cult analogy, and invariably many people have not heard of it so the story is told and retold. i'm fairly happy that my usual descriptions of the phenomenon were much less inaccurate or exaggerated than they could have been; generally closer to the John Frum reality than the "pop-culture" one. not at all like mondo cane (which i was unaware of). for example, i've said something like "to this day, there is a cult in which members paint themselves USA 'uniforms' and march in military style with 'guns' made of sticks'" (which appears accurate). i completely missed, however, the pre-ww-ii "cargo cult" beliefs which add quite a different perspective.
unfortunately, i don't know if i quite agree with abandoning the metaphor. the literal Feynman quote is about science. we in engineering have co-opted the term and use it (when imho done correctly) in a Feynman sense. i describe it as an Feynman anecdote. but it is one with significant grains of historical truth.
i find the curated list of HN examples illuminating because it appears that 1/2 or more of them are using the analogy poorly, missing the point, or simply as a kind of slur. meta-cargo-cult if you will. it is as said: "is simply a lazy, meaningless attack". i agree that it is heavily misused.
but in the conclusion, this leads to an argument that i see as a bit of a false dichotomy. i don't agree that Feynman's central point was either "doing something that has no chance of working" or we (mis)use it as "works but isn't understood". when Feynman said "but it doesn't work" i think meant within the analogy it didn't work: the planes did not show up. i don't think that when applied to science or engineering it only applies to something that "doesn't work". i think it's very much more about the central fallacy at play: misunderstanding processes that are built to support the science as being the science itself. misunderstanding effects for causes. misunderstanding and generalizing specific observations where they don't apply.
i think Feynman's anecdote is close enough to the anthropological one and not really detailed enough to be considered wrong. it's factually true that john frum cultists do what they do. the reasons they do it aren't quite right in our stories, but clarifying all the anthropological history doesn't kill the analogy, it might even strengthen it.
to me, used correctly the analogy is describing a religious or cultish adherence to principles that are not understood, in the hopes of some desired affect happening. it's similar to affirming the consequent. the fact that real cargo cults developed prior to ww-ii in places affects the story telling, not that its a cult. the fact that it's dangerous and harmful to the adherents is a good point for the analogy. the fact that the cults developed partially as a result of decades colonial oppression and mistreatment is a better framing than "look at the dumb thing those ignorant savages did". the fact that the cult members are expending energy which harms them for reasons they do not understand is still the truth. i've certainly never been as glib as "US soldiers show up with their cargo and planes, the indigenous residents amusingly misunderstand the situation, and everyone carries on."
the points about it being insensitive are well taken, however. no doubt.
- certainly there's a large amount of misuse of the analogy. and these uses are misused whether it be relative to pedantically accurate anthropology, Feynman, or pop-culture variations. but people using an analogy wrong does not make the analogy wrong.
- i think it's fine to use an anecdote and an analogy to communicate an idea about a harmful phenomenon. the an...
But the point is that the islanders were not mistaking effect for cause, but simply believing some wrong things.
For example, they were clearing the airstrips, not because they believed that doing so caused the cargo to appear, but simply to facilitate the delivery of the cargo if and when it came.
in some cases, but in others they may believe in a kind of sympathetic magic [1][2]. the John Frum's don't march around with stick guns and uniforms "simply to facilitate the delivery of cargo"
in either cases it's still highly apropos to the engineering analogy.
did you (hypothetically) add an unnecessary statement because you observed "good" programs doing it and believed if you did the same your program would be better? or because you thought you were facilitating something that was needed to be done to support something that isn't needed or won't happen? to me these are two sides of the same coin.
i've seen these kind of things (these are quick examples of the top of my head, not the worst things by far):
const char *str = "hello\0"; // make sure it's null terminated
if (ptr != NULL) free(ptr); // don't free if not allocated
Instead of just tearing down the current usage, you should have at least proposed an alternative that captures the metaphorical qualities that are being sought with the current terminology.
Yeah, I'm a fan of pragmatism also. An original version of it from Charles Peirce[1], not the version that James Williams and others promoted. "It can be beneficial to believe in God in a religious society, therefore the belief is true". Doesn't it sounds silly to you? So we are coming to a question: how would you define "it works"? If management full of cargo-cultists can achieve no technical goals but they still get their salaries, does "it work" or not?
Great post, with two important observations: Feynman's characterization of cargo cults is inaccurate and insensitive, and our contemporary use of "cargo cult" in an engineering context is an even more absurd distortion of Feynman's.
The basic premise of Feynman's interpretation is that cargo cults arose from post-war magical thinking by native Melanesians. TFA observes that (1) cargo cults predate the war, (2) are connected to a broader millenarian phenomena, and (3) don't involve magical thinking about the cargo per se but come from a pre-existing set of religious beliefs (pre-existing spirits/gods that would take cargo from foreigners and dispense it to the locals).
What makes "cargo cult" appealing as a technical is the fact that it's exotic (to the post's point about colonialism), not that the underlying phenomenon is particularly special. Substitute "cargo cult" with "Eucharist" and this becomes clear.
This article claims that anthropologists, who are the natural and proper authorities charged with gatekeeping in this issue, have a different definition of cargo cults from the one of the popular imagination.
But their their definition is just academically abstracted, that's all, so that it applies to as many cargo cults as possible. The "cargo" ingredient in it, still refers to man-made goods coming from somewhere outside the island!
The specific examples of cargo cults given in the article pretty much exactly fit the the popular understanding, and nicely support the cargo cult metaphor.
Cargo culting refers to magical thinking in regard to some man-made artifacts. In computing it refers to the idea that people use processes, or artifacts like code, without understanding them, hoping for some good outcome, or at least the avoidance of a bad outcome. Personality worship is also implicated in cargo culting. Some great programmers decades ago did something this way in a famous system that was successful so we shall do it that way, and be rewarded with a replication of their success.
Those cargo cults which long proceeded WWII and do not revolve around airplanes and white man's goods, still support the metaphor.
And anyway, no one ever said that the metaphor is based on absolutely all cargo cults, or that it has to be. It is inspired by a few specific instances and their specific events.
Maybe anthropologists should use "cargo cult" more specifically and use a different word for cultural phenomenon resembling cargo cults in which some key ingredients are missing. Perhaps a people who only believe that they will be rewarded with cargo in the afterlife, but otherwise don't worship foreign human beings who wants visited the island as gods, and do not try to make imitation cargo for use as props in rituals intended to attract their second coming, should perhaps not be understood as practicing a "cargo cult". Or perhaps a "weak cargo cult".
The power of a word or term rests in its ability to discern. The more meanings you cram into a word, the less it discerns. Say that we agree that everything is a cargo cult. Then what's the point of using those two words instead of just the word "everything"?
There's also the question of origin. Okay so anthropologists have a definition of cargo cult, under which cargo cults can be identified going back hundreds of years. But might it not be that the popular cargo cult came first, and then the academics try to hijack the word for their own use? What's the story here?
People understood fruits and vegetables before science told them that a tomato is a true fruit, whereas an apple isn't. Therefore, science should have used different words for its categorization, rather than coopting farm-to-kitchen terminology.
No, I'm not claiming that anthropologists are the "natural and proper authorities charged with gatekeeping"; that's nonsense. What I'm claiming is that the description of cargo cults that everyone knows is fiction.
The popular cargo cult story is a mixture of stuff that happened, stuff that was made up, and focusing on the wrong stuff. It's basically an urban legend at this point of people copying from other people.
It's a bit like saying that Christianity involves handling rattlesnakes and putting nails through your hands in the belief that God will turn your fillings to gold. That kind of misses the point.
The cargo cult metaphor has very little content: there are about two main ingredients in it, based on these features of the anecdote:
1. Foreigners visit island, riding on flying machines, bearing mysterious technology and products.
2. Foreigners disappear.
3. Locals worship foreigners as gods, develop a legend that foreigners will return, and use ad hoc hand-made objects whose shape resembles foreigners' technology to summon them, such as model airplanes made of bamboo, or pretend radios.
It might all be based on a single anecdote, and that is obvious to anyone with two brain cells. There might have been as few as one actual "cargo cult". I don't suspect anyone believes there were anywhere near half a dozen of these, let alone tens or a hundred or more.
A single anecdote is enough for a working metaphor.
The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre was one particular episode in history, in one place in the world. Yet we can bring up that name in any situation where the wrong incentives backfire.
That doesn’t mean that it isn’t a useful metaphor or idiom, though. When using the phrase “cargo cult programming”, no one really cares about what actual Polynesians did or didn’t do. One can take it as a fable. The term is used for its quality of being a memorable analogy, similar to “sour grapes”, for example.
It's obviously based on a few anecdotes involving a small number of indigenous groups ... perhaps mainly just one! "Cargo cult" should not be taken as a serious term, on the level of "polytheistic religion" or "agrarian society".
Anthropologists who take "cargo cult" seriously have let themselves be trolled by pop culture.
I missed the passage in the article which reveals that many anthropologists don't agree that there's such a thing as a cargo cult. So indeed, maybe all we have is a popular notion, which is obviously inspired by the behavior of a small number of very specific peoples in a narrow window of history of that region.
The history was a good read, but the conclusion feels like a strawman argument
> The cargo cult metaphor should be avoided for three reasons. First, the metaphor is essentially meaningless and heavily overused.
> Note that the metaphor in cargo-cult programming is the opposite of the metaphor in cargo-cult science: Feyman's cargo-cult science has no chance of working, while cargo-cult programming works but isn't understood.
This isn’t how I’ve seen the phrase used most often. People generally complain about cargo culting when management forces practices on a team that don’t work, nor are they understood. The “cargo cult” element describes the root cause of these ineffective practices as coming from imitating something they saw or heard about, but don’t understand. Using imitation as a substitute for experience.
For that, the phrase is uniquely effective at communicating what’s happening. People understand the situation without needed a long explanation.
I don’t see a need to retire the phrase, nor do I think this article accurately captures how it’s used.
cargo culting programming approaches don't just not work, they saddle with both all the costs of doing things in a certain way and having to still deliver the outputs somehow.
e.g. hiding work until you know what needs doing before pretending to come up with the information during bikeshedding sessions.
If the act never succeeded, nobody would join the cult. It sometimes succeeds, and you get the valuables: funding, whether via grants or employment or social score (which is the next sentence after what you copied). For the cults: those ships did bring cargo! That's how they knew ships carried people and cargo.
And because it's a cult, rather than science/programming, they have no explanation of why it fails when it fails. They're stuck repeating the cult practices (copy/paste more things, maybe reverse some if statements) until it succeeds again, which is just further evidence to the members that it does actually work.
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I can be game to drop the term (shockumentaries are worth leaning away from), but the thing it's identifying is extremely real, and a very large problem. It deserves to be labeled and called out. Sure, it's sometimes used inaccurately... but show me a term that can't be used inaccurately. That's just humanity doing its normal thing. Is it used too inaccurately? ...ehhh, I'm not convinced, but it might be borderline.
TBH I think that the modern-re-defining is just not all that far off (outside the fabricated stuff obviously). There's no "the world is ending and the dead are coming back with stuff" or "what's ours has been stolen" in the current use (... except maybe job losses due to automation), but there is a large chunk like you point out: rituals and technology that mimic things they have seen, and which don't work because of the lack of understanding.
If there's a better label to apply to ^ that kind of act/cult/ritual, I have yet to see it. Probably there is, but it's currently drowned out by "cargo cult" so it's kinda hard to find unless you're deeply in that area already.
> Sure, it's sometimes used inaccurately... but show me a term that can't be used inaccurately. That's just humanity doing its normal thing. Is it used too inaccurately? ...ehhh, I'm not convinced, but it might be borderline.
And even if it were used too inaccurately, that inaccuracy isn't the fault of the term itself. Whatever new term people come up with in its stead could be used just as inaccurately.
I think the nuance they are advocating for is twofold.
For the technical part, people do use cargo cult to refer to real, proven effective processes, tools, etc when those are misused as the wrong solution to a problem. But any example is subjective since this is ultimately a pejorative term.
The other side of the nuance is this: people imply some amount of foolishness or laughable nativity when they use the term. The reality of the original phenomenon is fairly dark, IMO, and can better be described as desperate and complex more than naive. So when you understand the deeper background on cargo cults, the metaphor feels off. It’s one of those things you “can’t unsee”.
I appreciated this article. The irony of "cargo cult" being the misunderstood phrase that people here like to use is not lost on me.
It's good to interrogate the wallpaper of colonialism, to discover what's hiding behind our euphemisms and clichés.
The phrase "cargo cult" as I had come to understand it before reading this article, definitely centered the cult's naivete ("oh those silly cargo cultists, worshipping shipping containers!"
But reading this passage:
> Other natives believed that God lived in Heaven, which was in the clouds and reachable by ladder from Sydney, Australia. God, along with the ancestors, created cargo in Heaven—"tinned meat, bags of rice, steel tools, cotton cloth, tinned tobacco, and a machine for making electric light"—which would be flown from Sydney and delivered to the natives, who thus needed to clear an airstrip
clarifies that this "naivete" was cultivated, by settlers with ulterior motives.
Using the idiom uncritically elides this dynamic, laundering the practices of missionaries that I'm sure most people here would loathe to be on the receiving end of.
Knowing this enriches the analogy when using it to describe aws lambda or whatever people use it for ("Who is producing the cargo? What are their motives? Why does one group have power over another?") but I think, in general, it would be good for people to find additional ways of talking about dynamics where people are making choices out of ignorance.
Because even if you don't agree with my social justice bent, I think Orwell was on the right track to say "never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."
I'm someone who used to use this phrase frequently after reading Feynman, but stopped long ago after realizing how lazy the story was. It became a popular phrase with the same crowd it most closely described. That's about the time people started saying things like "drink the Koolaid" in a positive sense. I guess the real revelation is that Orwell was the prophet of our own little apocalypse.
When I was working for a large US tech company, one of colleagues used that term to their American managers in a positive way (we were Linux people, after all): turned out he didn't know the origin. Significant faux pas!
I hear this used all the time with various meanings ranging from "being fully committed" to "being brainwashed". It usually implies a naive level of (or just misplaced) zeal but I feel like folks rarely mean the suicidal/homicidal part which can make the phrase quite shocking if you actually think about what is being said. Language and culture are weird.
Of course, someone could argue (analogously to this article) that the problem with the phrase is that the members of the People's Temple in Jonestown didn't drink poisoned Kool-Aid as often thought, but rather a different product called Flavor-Aid.
Wait wait wait... You're either misinterpreting the article or reading extra implications into it.
The observations of the pacific cargo cults are an example of religious and cultural syncretism which took on many varied and unique forms most commonly with the sudden increased presence of colonial and military forces in the Pacific along the very varied cultures and groups in that area especially during and after WW2 (and their subsequent sudden departure).
But it is similarly a step too far to imply this phenomenon or the resulting cults that developed was deliberately cultivated by colonialists or that military presence.
The "cargo" elicited in the term cargo cults is directly tied to this phenomenon: WW2 saw suddenly huge amounts of goods and logistics suddenly appear and then disappear from the Pacific regions as the war was fought and then subsequently finished.
Now there are also examples of religious syncretism that forms from missionaries trying to introduce Christianity to places all over the world (see South American and African interpretations of Christianity blending with local traditions), but those are not the cargo cults referred to that explicitly capture the primarily WW2 Pacific phenomenon even though there are other examples of syncretism of Christianity and Pacific religion that aren't cargo cults and aren't deliberately cultivated. Indeed, many times I'm guessing some of these practices are explicitly meet with resistance and annoyance from the likes of colonial missionaries and authorities, so as with most things its not that simple.
Hey thanks, you make a good point - I was too hasty in proclaiming the connection between christian designs and the practices of the tribespeople (especially because if this article makes one thing clear, it's that the events and practices of these islanders shouldn't be haphazardly generalized, given how varied they were.)
I wasn't only referring to the WWII period, though. My comment was also inspired by an excerpt about the 1871-1933 period, that I read in one of the sources the article's author used, Road Belong Cargo by Peter Lawrence, page 78:
> So far only the Europeans had possessed this secret and thus only their ancestral spirits had been sent with cargo. But now the position was going to change. Provided that the missionaries' instructions were carried out in full, the natives ancestors would be employed in the same way. Obedience to the missionaries would place the people in the correct relationship with God and give them what the Garia called Anut po nanunanu: the power to make God 'think on' them and send them cargo, just as the traditional leaders had had oite u po nanunanu or the power to make the indigenous deities help them in important undertakings.
But still, you're right that I don't know prevalent this dynamic was (many islands turned again the europeans) nor the exact extent to which this compliance was the explicit intention of european missionary activity, versus something independently arrived at by the islanders.
okay, but I really wasn't trying to imply that the good-bad moral line of WW2 should be rotated. It's about adding nuance: the effects of european colonialism in the pacific are massive, intertwined throughout society in ways that are more and less invisible to us, and that it's edifying to understand that.
More generally, all of history is like this. So I think it's good to attempt to understand history through multiple perspectives, to practise empathy in our use of language, to wonder if things could have been any different, and to think about how these causal forces shape our lives today.
I use clichés all the time, and I agree that as they come, "cargo cult" is a comparatively narrow one. But to Orwell's point, clichés compress meaning and then (through the power of association) pick up additional connotations that we mightn't all agree on. It's a trade-off. Many times I make that trade, but I know that when I do, there's a higher chance that other people will fill in blanks with their own cultural context than I realize.
It was an interesting read, and I enjoyed learning more about the history of the term as it was used once upon a time. That's the thing though, "once upon a time"... we're not colonial powers justifying our rule, we're just people adapting existing language and metaphors to modern problems.
That's the bottom line for me: language is a tool, it's descriptive and not prescriptive. I accept that the term "cargo cult" has a negative history, but it doesn't have a negative present, and the current use isn't in any way aimed at belittling distant tribes.
tl;dr We get to decide what words and phrases mean, and what utility they have, we don't have to be bound by the history of the thing.
The term itself is not self-explanatory, and requires delving into its backstory for it to mean something coherent -- doing so reiterates the racist caricature at the heart of the metaphor.
There are many terms and expressions that have been (largely) dispensed with because of their objectionable history, and of course many that have not. Seems to me that this one should be.
Tell you what, if the descendants of the alleged victims of this "racism" make it known that they find this usage offensive, I for one will drop it. On the basis of a blog post from, and I'm not sure of any other way to put this, a middle-aged white man however... I'm not so inclined. This feels uncomfortably similar to the "Latinx" debacle, in which people outside of the allegedly affected class took it upon themselves to find something to be offended by, then "fix" something the people themselves didn't think was broken... and certainly didn't want their "fix".
Nope, we’re not doing this in 2025. Cargo cult succinctly expresses an important concept. We’re not catering to imaginary offenses somebody hallucinates on behalf of some supposedly marginalized people anymore.
So first of all, I absolutely agree that it's an important concept: to me the idea is one of imitating externally observable behavior, patterns, what-not, without any understanding of what's going on underneath. Unlike what the author says, "cargo cult science" certainly can get some sorts of results; particularly when the desired results are actually things like "grant money".
> We’re not catering to imaginary offenses somebody hallucinates on behalf of some supposedly marginalized people anymore.
I'm still processing the information from the blog somewhat; but at the moment, for me, it doesn't come down so much to the idea that these people may be offended, but that it defames them. The story as told in popular culture gives people a skewed idea of what the cultists are like, and reinforces a skewed and arrogant idea about how much better / scientific / whatever the rest of us are. These skewed views hurt both us and the cultists.
It may be, like the "frog slowly boiling" myth, that it's the sort of thing you repeat even knowing that it's not something that actually happens.
Or maybe we need to come up with a different name for it -- although it's not as easy to come up with a picture that's as evocative as the pop culture version of the cargo cult.
> it doesn't come down so much to the idea that these people may be offended, but that it defames them. The story as told in popular culture gives people a skewed idea of what the cultists are like
This doesn’t matter. Nobody is talking about the actual cultists. It’s a metaphor to talk about how people right now, in our own society behave around certain topics. The story behind it is apocryphal.
> The story as told in popular culture gives people a skewed idea of what the cultists are like, and reinforces a skewed and arrogant idea about how much better / scientific / whatever the rest of us are.
This is precisely what GP is talking about. It is not defamation to infer that a primitive group of people is, well, primitive. You are imagining defamation on behalf of them.
The cargo cult story, as it goes, simply describes the (in many ways fascinating) behavior of humans when faced with phenomena they are unable to understand, and how they derive their own interpretations of what happened. Taking a humble approach, we may be in the same position when it comes to things we, from the height of our reason, do not understand as well.
> Taking a humble approach, we may be in the same position when it
comes to things we, from the height of our reason, do not understand
as well.
Isn't that the main point of that cargo-cult metaphor as used today -
a restatement of Arthur C Clarke's technology and magic remark and how
we've let our own magic exceed our reason... that we're no longer at
the "height" of reason at all?
> The cargo cult story, as it goes, simply describes the (in many ways fascinating) behavior of humans when faced with phenomena they are unable to understand
How can it teach us anything about human psychology if it never actually happened?
> It is not defamation to infer that a primitive group of people is, well, primitive.
Primitive doesn't mean stupid. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel", Jared Diamond said that nearly all the tribal peoples he met when doing fieldwork were seemed to be, on average, more intelligent, engaged, curious, and knowledgable than the average Westerner. (In his follow-up book, "The World Until Yesterday", he attempts to capture some potential wisdom that tribal peoples have that he thinks modern society may have lost.)
It's this confusion between "primitive" and "stupid" that is exactly the harm that he cargo cult story creates and perpetuates.
Which is why I used the word primitive, and not the word stupid. If you are making this confusion, that is on you. The "cargo cult" terminology does not imply stupidity. It implies, at most, ignorance.
Also, the tale may be apocryphal, but apocryphal tales (such as fairy tales) still can contain interesting insights about how humans behave. Maybe that's why they propagate through time.
> Also, the tale may be apocryphal, but apocryphal tales (such as fairy tales) still can contain interesting insights about how humans behave. Maybe that's why they propagate through time.
But do you make it clear to those you tell the cargo cult story that it is supposed to be apocryphal?
Otherwise I can spread all kinds of made-up stories about my work mates, and claim they illustrate truths about human nature, right?
> Otherwise I can spread all kinds of made-up stories about my work mates, and claim they illustrate truths about human nature, right?
Yes, you actually can do this, and if those stories do reflect actual human nature that other people also observe then they will be shared and spread. If they warn of potential problems that really do sometimes happen and allow other people to avoid those problems then they will be useful, even if they were made up!
Yes, I would say you have a very different opinion on slander and defamation from me and also from all of the western legal tradition.
You're going to have a bad time when you learn just how much of fiction is loosely based on / exaggerations / distortions of people and events that the author knew or experienced.
And, yes, if it helps, you have my permission to tell your junior engineers how ol' imgabe, in his hubris, once deleted the master database and was chained to a rock by the gods to have his liver pecked out by eagles for all eternity.
> Yes, I would say you have a very different opinion on slander and defamation from me and also from all of the western legal tradition.
I think you're misunderstanding what the GP was talking about.
If we worked together at a company, and I went to a bunch of junior new hires and said (falsely), "hey, let me tell you about the time imgabe deleted the production database, causing a week-long outage that lost us 20 of our customers", that would absolutely be defamation. That could even be legally actionable if you could prove that story was causing you harm (like perhaps clueless management heard and believed the story, and you were then passed up for promotion or a raise). Not saying that it would be easy to do so, but I personally think you'd be justified in being upset that someone made up a story like that about you. I have a reasonably thick skin, but I certainly wouldn't be pleased that a made-up story like that about me was circulating about me.
And even if you seriously wouldn't care about someone making up a story like that about you and using it as an object lesson at your workplace, assuming that no one would ever be offended or upset about that is... well, kinda shitty.
That is a tortured interpretation of what is happening here, though. Cargo cults did happen. And some of them did in fact operate in the way explained in the stories.
The point of the story is not to gloat and say "hahaha these stupid islanders are so dumb and we're so smart". The point is to illustrate a particular type of error and to make people aware that we, too, can make that very same error. That we are not, in fact, better and smarter, but rather the same and just as susceptible to the same errors.
The reason we use the story with the cargo cults is because the error is much easier to see from the other side, where you understand how the system actually works and you know why the things the islanders are doing won't actually result in any planes arriving. The point is that sometimes you are on the side the islanders are on where you are not understanding how the system works and you need to recognize that and work on understanding it and not just mindlessly imitating something.
This is obvious to anyone who is not walking around desperately searching for something to feel offended about.
> Otherwise I can spread all kinds of made-up stories about my work mates, and claim they illustrate truths about human nature, right?
This happens all the time, and it’s fine? A recent front page example [0] — did julius ever exist? Who knows. Would it change anything? Not really…
A problem could definitely arise if you specifically called out a coworker without anonymization, but speaking in broad strokes is… perfectly fine and uneventful
I don't think that example illustrates what the GP was arguing against. Julius is presumably not a real person, but is an amalgamation of behaviors made by real people. The author of that post may not have even ever known anyone names "Julius".
GP was talking about intentionally making up stories about real people, using their real names, and telling those stories to others who might actually even know the person in the false stories.
But that’s not really descriptive of anything discussed, is it? The cargo cult story names no names, and talks about a general group (south sea islanders). Calling out a specific individual raises a swath of other issues, but even that’s fairly commonly done with little issue for famous people… and it’s fine — especially when they’re famous & dead
This is a disingenuous reply. If you tell a story about a human group, and base your ideas of how humans behave based on that, it better be true. Otherwise we can base policy on all kinds of exotic stories that never happened.
It did happen for one thing, and for another such stories, even when fictitious, are crafted to illuminate a human behavior that does happen, even if that particular story did not literally happen. See, for example, all of literature.
OK, point taken; we tell the Emperor's New Clothes even though it never happened.
On the other hand, nobody thinks it actually did happen: it's understood to be ridiculously exaggerated to make a point. And there's not a specific named group of people who are implied to have actually been gullible enough to fall for the trick.
I find the actual cargo cult beliefs -- "our ancestors are sending us loads of cargo which the white people are stealing from us" -- in a way far more disturbing in a "teach us something about human psychology" way. Compare to, "There is loads of prosperity available, which {the government, the capitalists, immigrants} are stealing from us."
There are plenty of similar stories about real people though, that aren't true, but we tell them to make a point anyway.
I'm sure there's lots of people who believe Einstein flunked grade school math even though he didn't. The point is more important though - flunking grade school math is not the end of the world and you can still be successful in life. Einstein's reputation is relatively unharmed by this fabrication.
I still think it's important that people understand what actually happens.
FWIW, as a reasonably clever person (a paper I wrote in the course of my PhD got an ACM Hall of Fame award) who regularly got failing grades until I got into high school, I think that story about Einstein, if I heard it, only did me harm. I started putting in effort in high school sort of on accident. I wish someone would have kicked me in the ass much sooner, told me that nobody cares how smart you are if you don't get the job done, and that I'd better figure out how to make things happen or I'd be a wanna-be loser.
OTOH, it's said that people with dyslexia or other neurodivergences which cause them to struggle in school often make good entrepreneurs -- they're used to dealing with failure and used to working around their limitations to get things done.
Indeed, that's the point I was making earlier. It's one thing to tell an apocryphal story to illustrate something we already know to be true, and another to base our "truths" on made up stories.
Do humans ever get overconfident and slack off and lose to opponents who work more diligently? Why, yes, humans do do that and that’s what the story is about.
I think maybe you don’t understand fables, or possibly stories in general.
> How can it teach us anything about human psychology if it never actually happened?
I am sympathetic to this argument as I despise Lord of the Flies and always believed it was unrealistic, and was gratified recently to find that a similar real-life situation did occur and it did not turn out like the book at all.
However, in this case it did happen and that fact is seemingly not in dispute, as the article here uncritically quotes several sources describing cargo cult behavior matching Feynman's story almost exactly (Time Magazine and National Geographic). The main argument of this article seems to be that while there have been a couple of cases like this, there is a larger category of cargo cults which generally have other features and more complexity, though they are no less deluded overall. This argument falls flat for me. I don't see why this should be fatal to the metaphor.
The point is that the islanders were not mistaking effect for cause, but simply believing some wrong things.
For example, they were clearing the airstrips, not because they believed that doing so caused the cargo to appear, but simply to facilitate the delivery of the cargo if and when it came.
This is false. The quoted National Geographic article explicitly claims that they built airstrips and radio towers to attract cargo. Time Magazine, too, claims that they believed their rituals would cause the cargo to be delivered.
I'm not saying every cargo cult worked this way. I'm saying cargo cults that worked this way did exist according to the very sources quoted by the article, which it does not dispute.
> ...I despise Lord of the Flies and always believed it was unrealistic, and was gratified recently to find that a similar real-life situation did occur and it did not turn out like the book at all.
But that's stretching the meaning of the word "similar" rather far. Those were six guys in their upper teens; the book was about tens (over a hundred? Can't recall) boys around ten - twelve - lower-teens. Huuuge difference.
The premise of the article is not at all that cargo cults never happened. Instead, the article acknowledges that cargo cults happened, but claims they are misunderstood and often ill-documented, and therefore unsuitable for software metaphors.
The "never happened" claim is waaaay stronger and likely no credible or serious observer would make the "never happened" claim.
So what? If the argument is "ok, cargo cults did happen, but the reality of them has nothing to do with how we use 'cargo cult' as a poor software development metaphor, but we're still going to use it that way anyway"... that... seems worse, actually?
I think it's kinda shitty to make up a pejorative story about a group of people to describe a bad practice. But it seems really dumb to take a real story about that group of people, and then completely misinterpret it (intentionally or otherwise) and use it in a way that makes no sense.
I’m entertained at the notion of Diamond’s book refuting an idea popularized by Feynman. I’m convinced that they both make shit up. Feynman’s book wasn’t written by Feynman, but by a guy who heard Feynman’s stories years before, and Diamond’s book Guns Germs and Steel references many “facts” with zero citations that on further inspection turn out to be unsupported. Bullshit artist vs bullshit artist, basically.
> How can it teach us anything about human psychology if it never actually happened?
The same way fables and other fictional stories do. They contain an idea and communicate that idea to the listener. They deliberately pull away from the real world which is full of nuance and unnecessary details and present a story that contains the essence of the idea they're trying to convey to help make it clear.
Nobody believes that a goose that lays golden eggs exists, but they still get the idea that excessive greed can carry negative consequences from the fable. And they share that story as something they can refer to to express that notion. Feynman's story of the cargo cults is a fable just as well as Aesop's goose that laid the golden egg.
Tangentially, Yali, the New Guinea politician whose question set Diamond on the path to writing Guns, Germs, and Steel, was involved in cargo cultism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yali_(politician)
> The cargo cult story, as it goes, simply describes the (in many ways fascinating) behavior of humans when faced with phenomena they are unable to understand, and how they derive their own interpretations of what happened.
Also important, cargo cult mentality implies a inversion of cause and effect and a baseless and unsubstantiated assumption that correlated but irrelevant aspects are actually the root cause of a phenomenon. Such as building runways in the middle of nothing expecting that to be the trigger to have cargo dropped at your feet.
> It is not defamation to infer that a primitive group of people is, well, primitive.
Perhaps not, but it is certainly defamation to ascribe specific pejorative acts to people when they never actually acted in that way.
> The cargo cult story, as it goes, simply describes the (in many ways fascinating) behavior of humans when faced with phenomena they are unable to understand, and how they derive their own interpretations of what happened.
I feel like we can do this in a way that doesn't create a false narrative about an entire group or class of people, no?
And regardless of that, how can a story describe human behavior if the story doesn't describe behavior that actually happened?
> it is certainly defamation to ascribe specific pejorative acts to people when they never actually acted in that way
Except nothing in the cargo cult story is pejorative?
I mean, is it pejorative that ancient people worshipped the Sun as a God for bringing light and warmth to the world, not understanding what the Sun actually is? Religions were developed following that belief too.
I fail to see how it defames anything. Maybe the prejudice is in the eye of the observer in this case. Your disrespect for more primitive cultures makes you think their presumed behavior is detrimental to their intelligence.
> false narrative about an entire group or class of people, no?
First of all, it is not entirely clear that the story never happened. The accounts of cargo cults are disputed. I am simply giving it the benefit of doubt that the story may be apocryphal.
Second, the story does not paint a false narrative of anything. It just describes primitive cultures as primitive. Being primitive is not pejorative, it is merely descriptive. If you think it is pejorative, I suggest you spend some time reflecting on your prejudices.
> And regardless of that, how can a story describe human behavior if the story doesn't describe behavior that actually happened?
Have you ever read any fairy tale or old folktales? "The boy that called wolf"? "The emperor's new clothes"?
Perhaps you did not know, but those stories are fiction. Fictional stories can still contain allegories and insights on human behavior.
A weird notion, I know. The world is full of things like that.
No, fictional stories can not tell us something new about human behavior. yes, they can illustrate behavior we already know happens, but we need to be careful not to base any new understanding of human behavior on stories that did not happen.
Otherwise, then I guess we can stop studying psychology/sociology/anthropology/etc. and instead resort to making up stories all day to fill in what we do not know.
It's far easier to say yes to something else than to say no to something that is working.
Give an example of a term we can use instead that is more accurate and useful, and you won't need a wall of words to try and fail to convince people to change.
Are there still modern software using the floppy disk icon for save? I can't recall any.
In my experience most software that still use an icon for saving these days are using an arrow pointing down to a horizontal line. This icon is usually similar or exactly the same as a download icon.
I dont really get the defamation angle. It seems like the practices where still very strange and performative. They seem to argue that it was more frequently about radios and boats than airplanes. Is that that more offensive or hurtful?
I think the core of the metaphor is still there, that a practice can pass into lore and performance, severed from their logic and context.
> So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land.
(note no mention of fake airplanes)
And here are historical instances from the actual article:
> They hacked airstrips in the rain forest, but no planes came.
...
> They created mock radio antennas of bamboo and rope to receive news of the millennium.
...
> The leader remains in communication with John Frum through a tall pole said to be a radio mast, and an unseen radio. (The "radio" consisted of an old woman with electrical wire wrapper around her waist, who would speak gibberish in a trance.)
That looks to me like cargo cult in the pop culture sense.
At some point the fake airplane illustrations were inaccurately tacked on, but if anything they give the cults too much credit because they depict high-quality replicas.
except ... it doesn't. Unless you already know what it means, the term "cargo cult XXX" conveys absolutely nothing. And for what its worth, I'm 61 years old, I've been programming computers for more than 35 years, and until I read TFA I really did not know what "cargo cult programming" meant.
On the other hand, "boiler plate code" made perfect sense to me, but I suspect suffers from the exact same problem.
Well, all language has this fault that if you don't know what the words mean they don't convey anything. But you can learn what they mean and now you have a new phrase to easily communicate an idea to other people who also know what it means.
If you work with people from a country where baseball is not popular you might find that the phrase "ballpark figure" doesn't mean anything to them. That doesn't mean we need a finger-wagging article about how nobody should ever say it.
Arguing that we should excuse them is absurd, especially when googling the phrase "cargo cult programming" immediately reveals the relevant information, all for a grand total of five seconds of effort.
I've had no interest in what it means until the GP made the claim that it "succinctly expresses" something. The fact that I or anyone else can look something up doesn't really impact the question of how succinct of an expression it is.
The succinct expression is the idiom. It is two words that substitute for a much longer explanation.
It is both an expression and succinct, so long as you're willing to learn something new. Once you do, it can be used in the future for all similar circumstances.
Until some political weirdo recently went and defaced the wikipedia article on cargo cults, you could just google "cargo cult" and understand the analogy within 5 seconds.
The merit of “cargo cult” as a metaphor is that it’s memorable. Once you’ve heard the story behind it, it inherently expresses the aspect of doing something out of imitation rather than understanding, and that it relates to contexts where the thing doesn’t have the effect you think it has.
“Boiler plate” is absolutely not the same, in that boiler plate is generally necessary and thus the correct thing to do, and there is no implication that one applies it without understanding.
Yes, this exactly. In fact, we need a new term to describe the type of "cult" that pushes this agenda (probably the goal is just to get impressions/retweets more than an actual agenda though).
Human languages are full of idioms that have origins that no longer relate at all to the way the terms are used. It doesn't make them wrong or less useful.
The same people who will write a history phd dissertation about the obscure, problematic origins of some innocuous phrase will also tell you that you can't say "balls to the wall" because it's "sexually suggestive" and then stare blankly when you explain the phrase has nothing to do with genitalia.
You don’t get to decide for everyone what “we” are doing or not doing. People will make their own decision on what language they would like to use, including you.
If this was about the boiling frog metaphor, people wouldn't be nearly this upset: the metaphor is obviously ignorant and therefore not very useful to describe the underlying concept of people getting used to discomfort. You'd have a few people complain about pedantry, but nothing as angry as "nope, we're not doing this in 2025."
Why the heated feelings? The cargo cult metaphor is not merely ignorant, it is also blatantly racist, which explains the unhinged resentment in your comment: "imaginary offenses" "supposedly marginalized people" "hallucinates"
You are being proudly and angrily ignorant specifically because the cargo cult metaphor is racist, and hence aligns along partisan politics, and hence makes you want to fight. If it was boiling frogs you'd be amenable to thinking and learning. Instead you're waving a MAGA flag.
No, I would be making the same point if someone wrote an article that we shouldn't use the boiling frog metaphor because it is insulting to frogs.
And that is a good example. Despite the fact that the metaphor is not literally true it does a fine job of illustrating the idea of slowly acclimating to incremental changes.
Similarly, I’ve had to privately advise coworkers not to use the term “let a thousand flowers bloom” as an idiom meaning “let’s get ideas from lots of people.” It sounds great until you understand the horrible historical context in which it was originally said.
I disagree. The usage has detached from the historical context of the original (mis)quote, and there’s no good reason for it to be eternally enslaved by it. This is also reflected in entries like [0] and [1]. Indeed, the Wiktionary entry notes that it may “be used ironically, in negative view” of the Hundred Flower Campaign, which in turn means that by default that context isn’t implied, and instead as a proverb it merely has the meaning described above in the entry.
I don’t think it would be acceptable to say “Arbeiten macht frei” in a casual conversation. Just because Chinese history is distant from and unfamiliar to western experience doesn’t mean we should trivialize it.
Huh. What do you mean? Why should the phrase not be used?
My only experience with the phrase is to mean something along the lines of a calculated ploy to lure dissidents into exposing themselves for later punishment. The horrible historical context is pretty much the entire point of making the allusion at all.
I think things like this are a type of resource exhaustion attack on society. No one can be aware of all things potentially offensive to someone else. Its the hyperaware judges excluding mens rea from the equation before deciding guilt. What is the harm done to someone who might find this offensive? Why spend your time lifting the veil and shaming those around you who have no intention of harming anyone with their language? If they happen to offend a party some day, I am sure they will adjust their vocabulary accordingly. Why the haste to preempt this rare event?
Because a number of people on our team were born and raised in China. It’s very likely that some of them had family affected by the awful aftermath of the Hundred Flowers campaign.
This blog piece perfectly encapsulates an interesting discussion we are having as a society - "Do we need to care if a word has a hurtful etymology (if nobody using it nowadays knows that history)?"
Taking it out of the superheated culture-war lens, let's examine a more chill example: There's a popular meme with a girl crying and pointing and a cat sitting at a table. After some number of years somebody online pointed out that the panel on the left is some reality-tv personality going through a genuinely terrible life experience. They were sort of implying that everybody on the internet should stop using the meme for this reason.
Most of the arguments in either direction have thus-far been name-calling (due to culture-war nature). I'd be curious to see a well-reasoned from-first-principles argument in either direction, though curiously never have.
I think kindness is the answer and ironically often the reason people get so unpleasant.
It's OK not to know the hurtful etymology of something; it's also OK to be hurt by it and to educate those who don't know. To me the best way that this goes is that 'hurt party' kindly explains to 'unknowing party' who, in turn, kindly agrees to abandon hurtful term, and everyone moves on with life. What often happens however is either that unknowing party pushes back (often aggressively), imagining their rights to have been infringed, or else hurt party opens the discussion aggressively, perhaps anticipating pushback before it materialises, or perhaps just already upset at having long been on the receiving end of hurtful behaviour but previously unable to speak up, often because of systemic bias (think: oppression of black people in 1950's USA just as one example among many). And then we get a super-heated culture war, which is really just mixture of people wanting to be heard and understood, and some people deliberately stirring the pot for ulterior reasons.
The answer to your question is thus another question - do you care if people suffer because of the actions of others? If you do, then try to be kind, and remember that being kind sometimes means making minor sacrifices to bring greater benefit to others.
> hurt party opens the discussion aggressively, perhaps anticipating pushback before it materialises, or perhaps just already upset at having long been on the receiving end of hurtful behaviour but previously unable to speak up, often because of systemic bias
Another thing that happens quite often, especially in the context of online discussions, is that a third party opens the discussion aggressively and/or condescendingly, explaining how the phrase is unvirtuous and insisting that the first party renounce it.
> ...hurt party opens the discussion aggressively, perhaps anticipating pushback before it materialises, or perhaps just already upset at having long been on the receiving end of hurtful behaviour but previously unable to speak up, often because of systemic bias...
It's understandable that people on the receiving end of what you describe should react badly; however the compassionate approach is to try to listen first, understand that the aggression or condescension may be an attempt to control the conversation out of fear of not being heard (a fear which may be grounded in experience), or a kind of emotional exhaustion at having been on the receiving end of hurtful treatment for a long time already.
So, you're right, that's not a productive approach, but I think it's more important how someone moves forward from that; if they dig in and fight back, then all we get is a war. Actually this applies in any interaction where someone is behaving unpleasantly towards you; if you can contain your natural defensive reaction and show kindness in return, you will often find that the situation relaxes, and maybe that person is upset for totally unrelated reasons - perhaps you just crossed their path at a bad time. And again, it's not OK for someone to shout at you - but the compassionate response will often make the outcome better for both of you.
I don't think that's the same thing. To paraphrase both cases to make it easier to correct me:
Case you're describing: Person1 makes a statement, Person2 demands that Person1 not act like this. Person2's manner is a little aggressive (in hindsight, understandably) because they've copped this too much in the past already, even if this instance isn't particularly egregious and a milder approach would have been more suitable.
Case I'm describing: Person1 makes a statement, Person3 starts aggressively demanding that Person1 not act like this due to the harm that it causes Person2, and instead conform to Person3's espoused 'correct' behaviour. Person3 is seeking social power by using Person2's alleged hurt as leverage, while Person2 may not even be aware of the interchange, let alone harmed by it.
Well I think you addressed the simplest case, which wasn't really the situation here (nor in the meme).
I think if somebody directly offends you by calling you something you don't like, then from first-principles, it does seem like you're always okay letting them know that and seeing if they mind stopping. And most kind people would.
But in the meme-case it wasn't the lady in the meme asking people to stop, it was just some random girl on reddit. Same with the cargo-culting, I don't think the cargo-cults themselves are objecting, rather it is somebody objecting on behalf of another group.
Or the case of how we name our git-branches is even more indirect (since nobody is calling anybody anything, except a git-branch).
I'd love to hear some from-first-principles, emotionless arguments with clear proposals (e.g. If x% of people think term Y offends group Z, at what threshhold do we care? And does only group Z get to vote?).
I think what you're asking for are the kinds of philosophical questions that don't have clean logical answers. I agree that the cases of people advocating for groups they are not members of are more challenging, but I think they're also highly situation-dependent; for example what representation does group Z have already? And how do you quantify that?
In my experience a lot of these problems ultimately trace their cause back to some systemic imbalance that's often invisible to those on the 'winning' side of it. Take the idea of 'white privilege'; a lot of white people live in very poor or difficult circumstances, and probably don't feel privileged, but the real meaning of that phrase is that their situation would be even worse if they weren't white, and purely because of their appearance. So I think if you want proposals for dealing with these kinds of problem, then fixing the societal systems is where you want to look, rather than dealing with the proximate causes. Most of us can only work on the level of symptoms with this one though, hence my initial reply.
I'm not asking for a philosophical proof of which terms are or aren't bad. I am proposing that rather than taking every single complaint seriously that we try to set some basic structure or benchmark.
I perceive that the current state of language-policing is anarchy: anybody can all anything bad/harmful/problematic/ism etc. Often a small group suddenly decides that their personal judgments on language should be followed by all, and it makes the remaining majority bristle, particularly if they try to enforce it without bothering to make a compelling case and win popular support.
I perceived this blog-post to be one piece of noise in this free-for-all.
Perhaps it's time for a better system than anarchy -- such as setting a standard (majority vote of the affected group?).
I don't think the general concept that "victims must be able to articulate the exact damage done to them or else no harm was done" nor "if some of the victims of something say it's ok then it is ok for everyone" are very sound.
This is not an attack on what you're saying and I'm not saying it even applies wholly right now, it just sticks out to me as a problem with any approach where "a majority of people publicly express an opinion" as a criteria.
> To me the best way that this goes is that 'hurt party' kindly explains to 'unknowing party' who, in turn, kindly agrees to abandon hurtful term, and everyone moves on with life.
I addressed that in a sibling comment but to phrase my answer in a different way - your choice is between escalation, de-escalation, or stepping away. Escalation doesn't make anything better apart from providing a moment of catharsis, so if you choose to engage then you could try to understand the other person's point of view and where their unreasonable behaviour comes from. Some people are irredeemably unreasonable; those ones you step away from. Many others however were already feeling unheard and upset before they met you, and they brought that into the conversation.
For an example - if you're familiar with The Expanse (great scifi if you like that sort of thing), then imagine you're a belter living on an asteroid, and for your whole life you've been called a 'skinny' by planet-dwelling types in a derogatory reference to your low-gravity physique, then one day someone calls you that without realising what it means except that's a common nickname for belters. The reasonable response from you would be to politely ask them not to, and explain why. The more likely response is one of anger at the insult, even if the other party intended no such insult. You're behaving in an apparently unreasonable way, but based on a lifetime of experience. The other person could return the hostility, then everyone is unhappy. Or they could respond with compassion, and the outcome would likely be much better for both of you.
The girl already cried. Making it into a meme doesn't make her cry more. People using the meme are exercising their Freedom (of speech, in this case). That freedom of speech isn't really infringing on anyone else's rights, so it's essentially zero cost. Freedom is the second most important natural right, right after Life.[1]
The only argument for not using the meme here would be if _the actual girl in the meme_ wrote an open letter asking people not to use it publicly because every time she sees it she feels those emotions again or some such. I would definitely stop using it then--not that I use that meme to begin with, but that's really besides the point.
I don't care if some rando online wants to police speech. They have no power or right to do so. They are free to have an _opinion_, just as I am, because again, Freedom is a very important right. And they have no right to limit any of my rights, unless my exercise of some right infringed on a higher right of theirs e.g. I cannot claim to have the Freedom to negatively affect their Life.
And, importantly, I think some third-party claiming they are hurt by the use of that meme on behalf of the woman in the photo is not a tenable position. They could only do so if she had expressed the desire for people to stop using the meme, in which case it would still not make a difference whether such people felt hurt or not, but rather that the actual woman was hurt.
There's your argument from first principles. QED.
---
1. I'm handwaving this hierarchy of rights and the existence of natural rights, but hopefully it isn't too controversial to claim that the Life is the paramount right and Freedom should follow closely. I've thought long and hard about this and could never find a better hierarchy. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that every other right derives from just those two rights and their hierarchy relative to each other and to all other rights, but since I have no degree in Law or Philosophy to support such a claim robustly, I can only propose it as a thought experiment left as an exercise to the reader.
Great argument overall. What strikes me is that I have also thought long and hard about fundamental natural rights, and my proposition is that Free Will is paramount and Privacy is the close second.
I believe such a claim can be robustly supported, and it is my hope to one day do so, ideally supported with a degree of philosophy. Your perspective is, in some ways, quite similar to my own, though it also has notable differences. I do believe it can be rigorously argued, for example, that Life is an outcome of Free Will, not the other way around. I believe it can also be shown that Privacy (not the cybernetic privacy, or cyberprivacy, articulated with privacy policies, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA) is (a) distinct from Free Will, (b) uniquely allows for the expression and development of Free Will, and (c) that maximal expression of Free Will is the global optimum for Life.
Thanks for the reply and for giving me further food for thought. I'll have to think more about it but I can see how Privacy fits this framework. My first inclination is to see Privacy as a consequence of Freedom, meaning you are free not to disclose something if you choose so. I'm still seeing Life as the foremost right because without it, you can't exercise any other rights, and because one's right to be free cannot infringe another one's right to live, generally speaking. But regardless, you've given me lots of great food for thought, so thank you again for that reply and I look forward to seeing your paper posted here one day
Cargo cult is, to me a tag for a particular kind of action. Where someone does something without an understanding of the mechanism they are using. My best example is agile development. Many (most) people implement agile without really understanding what how it is supposed to work. This is common, and it is a real thing, and a real problem we have. We have. One could give this some other name. Perhaps recipe-ism. Where you follow a recipe instead of understanding the process. But, personally, cargo cult sort of captures the essence of the thing. I never saw it as about Feynman, colonialism, racism or such. It is just about human nature. To me.
Speaking of recipes, the article very much reminded me of internet recipes, the ones that try to cram in as many ads as possible. So the recipe is preceded by the writer's life history, the history of the recipe, whether the name of the product is politically correct and then (200 ads later) three lines of the stuff you were really looking for. And in the worst circumstances you find that the core thing was not really all that informative. Sigh.
Hmm, "Cargo cult Agile"...? Yeah, the way "Agile"[1] is too often practiced, the way that has made everyone under ~45 hate "Agile", with its focus on Scrum and meetings and tickets and the ceremonies of "Agile"... Focus on ceremonies; how much more cult-like can you get? Yup: Cargo cult Agile.
The unfortunate thing is that the tag word "agile" in this context has obliterated some very sound ideas of how to effectively develop software in teams. But that would require actual thinking. In lieu of that, maybe we should just get some kind of high priests to run the scrum meetings? Sorry. I have been in the software business way, way too long.
If anyone actually wants to think about software development, my starting point would be John Holland's "Hidden Order". Don't read it. Try to implement it for software development teams.
> In lieu of that, maybe we should just get some kind of high priests to run the scrum meetings?
My new mantra: If the Scrum Shaman doesn't have a feathered mask, a rattle with bones in it, and a small fire for burning pieces of sacrificial goat meat, they're obviously a fraud and I ain't participating.
A more neutral term is "sympathetic magic"[1] (also called "imitative magic") which seems to be somewhat of a cross-cultural human universal. At is core, it is the belief that if person/thing X does Y action to get Z result, and I mimic X by also doing Y, then I will also get Z.
In some cases it's a confusion be correlation and causality.
Aspects of "sympathetic magic" are definitely present the quasi-religious beliefs of cargo cults (John Frum, etc. [2]), granted they are also political and social movements.
> In some cases it's a confusion be correlation and causality.
I wouldn't say confusion. If you read Ramsey Dukes for example, a magician focusing on correlation rather than causation is the whole point. The belief is that a) there are non-causal aspects to existence; and b) it doesn't matter why it works, so long as it works.
That is, according to Dukes, a magician is intentionally uninterested in causation, and leaves it for the scientists to worry about.
“Imitation without understanding”, “imitating but misconstruing”, “mindless imitation”, “superficial emulation”, &c.
I think “cargo culting” in the popular sense means little more than that (whereas actual cargo culting is much more complex, as the featured article describes).
something happened but you’re not sure why, so you guess it’s because of something you did, and you decide to ritualistically repeat what you did in the hopes that thing that happened before happens again.
It’s a misunderstanding of cause and effect - so when you repeat the cause, looking to repeat the effect, you’re puzzled that it doesn’t work this time.
If you have to explain in 5000 words how it would offend someone and hardly anyone really knows the backstory (or your version of it perhaps) before reading your 5000 word article, including the people you think could be offended, it probably means it's not offensive. Just sayin.
732 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 340 ms ] threadHave you thought about an alternative concept or word that describes this phenomenon that could be used instead?
I think "magical thinking" would be an appropriate term for what Feynman characterizes.
However, one of the post's important points is that we're not even using Feynman's mischaracterized explanation of cargo cults: it's become a generic negative descriptor for anything the user considers insufficiently justified, even if the underlying rationale is not "magical."
It appears that there are some people (like you and the post author) that are constantly confronted with someone screaming "cargo cult", which has to be exhausting. But it's absolutely not the world others live in. In my world, it comes up every now and then (I'd guess every 3-4 months), and I've experienced it multiple times that I mention it and the other person hadn't heard it before but absolutely LOVED the term after an explanation because it describes certain behaviors so well.
Or in other words, magical thinking doesn't imply the lack of a conceptual connection: airstrips and planes landing are definitely conceptually connected. Magical thinking is the drawing of illogical causative connections from conceptual ones.
(I don't run into "cargo cult" that often. But I think TFA is a great writeup of why it's not the best term; as engineers, I think we should aspire to use the best terms available to us.)
That's not what I usually encounter. I see people imitating something they've seen others do (who appear to be successful) without understanding the full concept. Their efforts are in vain because clearing the brush for an airstrip doesn't make the planes land, and neither does one deliver projects more successfully by changing nothing except asking everyone to join a daily meeting each morning.
Cargo-culting is the belief that specific best practices which are causally connected to an outcome in one context will produce those outcomes in other contexts where the chain of causal reasoning no longer holds. For example, "I survived the car crash because I was wearing a seatbelt. Now I'll install a seatbelt on my bicycle too."
Cargo-culting is an important concept in its own right in the tech industry, because those best practices do get often blindly shared, recommended and even enforced into codes and standards, even when the context that made them a good idea is lost. Without a concept like "cargo-culting" to label the fallacy, it can be hard to argue against that proposal, because the side recommending the change has lots of out-of-context data in their favor. For example, "car-crash survival rates are much higher when drivers are wearing seatbelts. Therefore, we're now requiring bicycles and motorbikes to have seatbelts."
Look, these people were seriously believing some ridiculous junk. Most Europeans once believed some ridiculous junk. There's millennia old ridiculous junk still being believed. It's all "cargo cult".
In any case, I enjoyed reading the history too.
Thank you for the amazing thoroughness in your research. I just read aloud the entire article with my kid. So many tributaries of history and science to explore later.
Things that I referenced in our discussion about this article.
Memetics and how ideas spread as contagion https://richarddawkins.net/2014/02/whats-in-a-meme/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania
How slang, and low fluency spread from person to person can create divergent dialects.
The apocryphal story of cutting the pot roast to fit the pan. How things start true but get transformed through transcription errors. The main theme and the message may be retained, but the specifics get jumbled up.
Great Sunday read!
i am fond of using the cargo-cult analogy, and invariably many people have not heard of it so the story is told and retold. i'm fairly happy that my usual descriptions of the phenomenon were much less inaccurate or exaggerated than they could have been; generally closer to the John Frum reality than the "pop-culture" one. not at all like mondo cane (which i was unaware of). for example, i've said something like "to this day, there is a cult in which members paint themselves USA 'uniforms' and march in military style with 'guns' made of sticks'" (which appears accurate). i completely missed, however, the pre-ww-ii "cargo cult" beliefs which add quite a different perspective.
unfortunately, i don't know if i quite agree with abandoning the metaphor. the literal Feynman quote is about science. we in engineering have co-opted the term and use it (when imho done correctly) in a Feynman sense. i describe it as an Feynman anecdote. but it is one with significant grains of historical truth.
i find the curated list of HN examples illuminating because it appears that 1/2 or more of them are using the analogy poorly, missing the point, or simply as a kind of slur. meta-cargo-cult if you will. it is as said: "is simply a lazy, meaningless attack". i agree that it is heavily misused.
but in the conclusion, this leads to an argument that i see as a bit of a false dichotomy. i don't agree that Feynman's central point was either "doing something that has no chance of working" or we (mis)use it as "works but isn't understood". when Feynman said "but it doesn't work" i think meant within the analogy it didn't work: the planes did not show up. i don't think that when applied to science or engineering it only applies to something that "doesn't work". i think it's very much more about the central fallacy at play: misunderstanding processes that are built to support the science as being the science itself. misunderstanding effects for causes. misunderstanding and generalizing specific observations where they don't apply.
i think Feynman's anecdote is close enough to the anthropological one and not really detailed enough to be considered wrong. it's factually true that john frum cultists do what they do. the reasons they do it aren't quite right in our stories, but clarifying all the anthropological history doesn't kill the analogy, it might even strengthen it.
to me, used correctly the analogy is describing a religious or cultish adherence to principles that are not understood, in the hopes of some desired affect happening. it's similar to affirming the consequent. the fact that real cargo cults developed prior to ww-ii in places affects the story telling, not that its a cult. the fact that it's dangerous and harmful to the adherents is a good point for the analogy. the fact that the cults developed partially as a result of decades colonial oppression and mistreatment is a better framing than "look at the dumb thing those ignorant savages did". the fact that the cult members are expending energy which harms them for reasons they do not understand is still the truth. i've certainly never been as glib as "US soldiers show up with their cargo and planes, the indigenous residents amusingly misunderstand the situation, and everyone carries on."
the points about it being insensitive are well taken, however. no doubt.
- certainly there's a large amount of misuse of the analogy. and these uses are misused whether it be relative to pedantically accurate anthropology, Feynman, or pop-culture variations. but people using an analogy wrong does not make the analogy wrong.
- i think it's fine to use an anecdote and an analogy to communicate an idea about a harmful phenomenon. the an...
For example, they were clearing the airstrips, not because they believed that doing so caused the cargo to appear, but simply to facilitate the delivery of the cargo if and when it came.
in either cases it's still highly apropos to the engineering analogy.
did you (hypothetically) add an unnecessary statement because you observed "good" programs doing it and believed if you did the same your program would be better? or because you thought you were facilitating something that was needed to be done to support something that isn't needed or won't happen? to me these are two sides of the same coin.
i've seen these kind of things (these are quick examples of the top of my head, not the worst things by far):
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult [2] https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-322270499/view?partId=nla.obj-322...[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce
edit: typo
I don’t think that the post really supports that idea at all. It was incomplete, perhaps, but does not sound inaccurate.
The basic premise of Feynman's interpretation is that cargo cults arose from post-war magical thinking by native Melanesians. TFA observes that (1) cargo cults predate the war, (2) are connected to a broader millenarian phenomena, and (3) don't involve magical thinking about the cargo per se but come from a pre-existing set of religious beliefs (pre-existing spirits/gods that would take cargo from foreigners and dispense it to the locals).
What makes "cargo cult" appealing as a technical is the fact that it's exotic (to the post's point about colonialism), not that the underlying phenomenon is particularly special. Substitute "cargo cult" with "Eucharist" and this becomes clear.
But their their definition is just academically abstracted, that's all, so that it applies to as many cargo cults as possible. The "cargo" ingredient in it, still refers to man-made goods coming from somewhere outside the island!
The specific examples of cargo cults given in the article pretty much exactly fit the the popular understanding, and nicely support the cargo cult metaphor.
Cargo culting refers to magical thinking in regard to some man-made artifacts. In computing it refers to the idea that people use processes, or artifacts like code, without understanding them, hoping for some good outcome, or at least the avoidance of a bad outcome. Personality worship is also implicated in cargo culting. Some great programmers decades ago did something this way in a famous system that was successful so we shall do it that way, and be rewarded with a replication of their success.
Those cargo cults which long proceeded WWII and do not revolve around airplanes and white man's goods, still support the metaphor.
And anyway, no one ever said that the metaphor is based on absolutely all cargo cults, or that it has to be. It is inspired by a few specific instances and their specific events.
Maybe anthropologists should use "cargo cult" more specifically and use a different word for cultural phenomenon resembling cargo cults in which some key ingredients are missing. Perhaps a people who only believe that they will be rewarded with cargo in the afterlife, but otherwise don't worship foreign human beings who wants visited the island as gods, and do not try to make imitation cargo for use as props in rituals intended to attract their second coming, should perhaps not be understood as practicing a "cargo cult". Or perhaps a "weak cargo cult".
The power of a word or term rests in its ability to discern. The more meanings you cram into a word, the less it discerns. Say that we agree that everything is a cargo cult. Then what's the point of using those two words instead of just the word "everything"?
There's also the question of origin. Okay so anthropologists have a definition of cargo cult, under which cargo cults can be identified going back hundreds of years. But might it not be that the popular cargo cult came first, and then the academics try to hijack the word for their own use? What's the story here?
People understood fruits and vegetables before science told them that a tomato is a true fruit, whereas an apple isn't. Therefore, science should have used different words for its categorization, rather than coopting farm-to-kitchen terminology.
It's a bit like saying that Christianity involves handling rattlesnakes and putting nails through your hands in the belief that God will turn your fillings to gold. That kind of misses the point.
1. Foreigners visit island, riding on flying machines, bearing mysterious technology and products.
2. Foreigners disappear.
3. Locals worship foreigners as gods, develop a legend that foreigners will return, and use ad hoc hand-made objects whose shape resembles foreigners' technology to summon them, such as model airplanes made of bamboo, or pretend radios.
It might all be based on a single anecdote, and that is obvious to anyone with two brain cells. There might have been as few as one actual "cargo cult". I don't suspect anyone believes there were anywhere near half a dozen of these, let alone tens or a hundred or more.
A single anecdote is enough for a working metaphor.
The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre was one particular episode in history, in one place in the world. Yet we can bring up that name in any situation where the wrong incentives backfire.
Anthropologists who take "cargo cult" seriously have let themselves be trolled by pop culture.
"Byzantine generals", anyone?
> The cargo cult metaphor should be avoided for three reasons. First, the metaphor is essentially meaningless and heavily overused.
> Note that the metaphor in cargo-cult programming is the opposite of the metaphor in cargo-cult science: Feyman's cargo-cult science has no chance of working, while cargo-cult programming works but isn't understood.
This isn’t how I’ve seen the phrase used most often. People generally complain about cargo culting when management forces practices on a team that don’t work, nor are they understood. The “cargo cult” element describes the root cause of these ineffective practices as coming from imitating something they saw or heard about, but don’t understand. Using imitation as a substitute for experience.
For that, the phrase is uniquely effective at communicating what’s happening. People understand the situation without needed a long explanation.
I don’t see a need to retire the phrase, nor do I think this article accurately captures how it’s used.
If the act never succeeded, nobody would join the cult. It sometimes succeeds, and you get the valuables: funding, whether via grants or employment or social score (which is the next sentence after what you copied). For the cults: those ships did bring cargo! That's how they knew ships carried people and cargo.
And because it's a cult, rather than science/programming, they have no explanation of why it fails when it fails. They're stuck repeating the cult practices (copy/paste more things, maybe reverse some if statements) until it succeeds again, which is just further evidence to the members that it does actually work.
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I can be game to drop the term (shockumentaries are worth leaning away from), but the thing it's identifying is extremely real, and a very large problem. It deserves to be labeled and called out. Sure, it's sometimes used inaccurately... but show me a term that can't be used inaccurately. That's just humanity doing its normal thing. Is it used too inaccurately? ...ehhh, I'm not convinced, but it might be borderline.
TBH I think that the modern-re-defining is just not all that far off (outside the fabricated stuff obviously). There's no "the world is ending and the dead are coming back with stuff" or "what's ours has been stolen" in the current use (... except maybe job losses due to automation), but there is a large chunk like you point out: rituals and technology that mimic things they have seen, and which don't work because of the lack of understanding.
If there's a better label to apply to ^ that kind of act/cult/ritual, I have yet to see it. Probably there is, but it's currently drowned out by "cargo cult" so it's kinda hard to find unless you're deeply in that area already.
And even if it were used too inaccurately, that inaccuracy isn't the fault of the term itself. Whatever new term people come up with in its stead could be used just as inaccurately.
For the technical part, people do use cargo cult to refer to real, proven effective processes, tools, etc when those are misused as the wrong solution to a problem. But any example is subjective since this is ultimately a pejorative term.
The other side of the nuance is this: people imply some amount of foolishness or laughable nativity when they use the term. The reality of the original phenomenon is fairly dark, IMO, and can better be described as desperate and complex more than naive. So when you understand the deeper background on cargo cults, the metaphor feels off. It’s one of those things you “can’t unsee”.
It's good to interrogate the wallpaper of colonialism, to discover what's hiding behind our euphemisms and clichés.
The phrase "cargo cult" as I had come to understand it before reading this article, definitely centered the cult's naivete ("oh those silly cargo cultists, worshipping shipping containers!"
But reading this passage:
> Other natives believed that God lived in Heaven, which was in the clouds and reachable by ladder from Sydney, Australia. God, along with the ancestors, created cargo in Heaven—"tinned meat, bags of rice, steel tools, cotton cloth, tinned tobacco, and a machine for making electric light"—which would be flown from Sydney and delivered to the natives, who thus needed to clear an airstrip
clarifies that this "naivete" was cultivated, by settlers with ulterior motives.
Using the idiom uncritically elides this dynamic, laundering the practices of missionaries that I'm sure most people here would loathe to be on the receiving end of.
Knowing this enriches the analogy when using it to describe aws lambda or whatever people use it for ("Who is producing the cargo? What are their motives? Why does one group have power over another?") but I think, in general, it would be good for people to find additional ways of talking about dynamics where people are making choices out of ignorance.
Because even if you don't agree with my social justice bent, I think Orwell was on the right track to say "never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."
wait, when was this? is there a linkable example? (i don't doubt you, but that's pretty bad)
The observations of the pacific cargo cults are an example of religious and cultural syncretism which took on many varied and unique forms most commonly with the sudden increased presence of colonial and military forces in the Pacific along the very varied cultures and groups in that area especially during and after WW2 (and their subsequent sudden departure).
But it is similarly a step too far to imply this phenomenon or the resulting cults that developed was deliberately cultivated by colonialists or that military presence.
The "cargo" elicited in the term cargo cults is directly tied to this phenomenon: WW2 saw suddenly huge amounts of goods and logistics suddenly appear and then disappear from the Pacific regions as the war was fought and then subsequently finished.
Now there are also examples of religious syncretism that forms from missionaries trying to introduce Christianity to places all over the world (see South American and African interpretations of Christianity blending with local traditions), but those are not the cargo cults referred to that explicitly capture the primarily WW2 Pacific phenomenon even though there are other examples of syncretism of Christianity and Pacific religion that aren't cargo cults and aren't deliberately cultivated. Indeed, many times I'm guessing some of these practices are explicitly meet with resistance and annoyance from the likes of colonial missionaries and authorities, so as with most things its not that simple.
I wasn't only referring to the WWII period, though. My comment was also inspired by an excerpt about the 1871-1933 period, that I read in one of the sources the article's author used, Road Belong Cargo by Peter Lawrence, page 78:
> So far only the Europeans had possessed this secret and thus only their ancestral spirits had been sent with cargo. But now the position was going to change. Provided that the missionaries' instructions were carried out in full, the natives ancestors would be employed in the same way. Obedience to the missionaries would place the people in the correct relationship with God and give them what the Garia called Anut po nanunanu: the power to make God 'think on' them and send them cargo, just as the traditional leaders had had oite u po nanunanu or the power to make the indigenous deities help them in important undertakings.
But still, you're right that I don't know prevalent this dynamic was (many islands turned again the europeans) nor the exact extent to which this compliance was the explicit intention of european missionary activity, versus something independently arrived at by the islanders.
Complaining of colonialism in the context of WW2 and implying, if I'm reading you right, that the West is the bad guy is quite ironic.
This was a war against arguably the most depraved, murderous colonial empire that's ever existed, or at best second only to their Nazi allies.
> I think Orwell was on the right track to say "never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."
It's an idiom that perfectly encapsulates a specific phenomenon. Compared to many current clichés, I've hardly ever seen it misapplied.
More generally, all of history is like this. So I think it's good to attempt to understand history through multiple perspectives, to practise empathy in our use of language, to wonder if things could have been any different, and to think about how these causal forces shape our lives today.
I use clichés all the time, and I agree that as they come, "cargo cult" is a comparatively narrow one. But to Orwell's point, clichés compress meaning and then (through the power of association) pick up additional connotations that we mightn't all agree on. It's a trade-off. Many times I make that trade, but I know that when I do, there's a higher chance that other people will fill in blanks with their own cultural context than I realize.
That's the bottom line for me: language is a tool, it's descriptive and not prescriptive. I accept that the term "cargo cult" has a negative history, but it doesn't have a negative present, and the current use isn't in any way aimed at belittling distant tribes.
tl;dr We get to decide what words and phrases mean, and what utility they have, we don't have to be bound by the history of the thing.
I think that's a good heuristic to apply.
So first of all, I absolutely agree that it's an important concept: to me the idea is one of imitating externally observable behavior, patterns, what-not, without any understanding of what's going on underneath. Unlike what the author says, "cargo cult science" certainly can get some sorts of results; particularly when the desired results are actually things like "grant money".
> We’re not catering to imaginary offenses somebody hallucinates on behalf of some supposedly marginalized people anymore.
I'm still processing the information from the blog somewhat; but at the moment, for me, it doesn't come down so much to the idea that these people may be offended, but that it defames them. The story as told in popular culture gives people a skewed idea of what the cultists are like, and reinforces a skewed and arrogant idea about how much better / scientific / whatever the rest of us are. These skewed views hurt both us and the cultists.
It may be, like the "frog slowly boiling" myth, that it's the sort of thing you repeat even knowing that it's not something that actually happens.
Or maybe we need to come up with a different name for it -- although it's not as easy to come up with a picture that's as evocative as the pop culture version of the cargo cult.
This doesn’t matter. Nobody is talking about the actual cultists. It’s a metaphor to talk about how people right now, in our own society behave around certain topics. The story behind it is apocryphal.
This is precisely what GP is talking about. It is not defamation to infer that a primitive group of people is, well, primitive. You are imagining defamation on behalf of them.
The cargo cult story, as it goes, simply describes the (in many ways fascinating) behavior of humans when faced with phenomena they are unable to understand, and how they derive their own interpretations of what happened. Taking a humble approach, we may be in the same position when it comes to things we, from the height of our reason, do not understand as well.
Isn't that the main point of that cargo-cult metaphor as used today - a restatement of Arthur C Clarke's technology and magic remark and how we've let our own magic exceed our reason... that we're no longer at the "height" of reason at all?
There is quite a lot of things any person is unable to understand about our own word, and you can see how they handle those.
How can it teach us anything about human psychology if it never actually happened?
> It is not defamation to infer that a primitive group of people is, well, primitive.
Primitive doesn't mean stupid. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel", Jared Diamond said that nearly all the tribal peoples he met when doing fieldwork were seemed to be, on average, more intelligent, engaged, curious, and knowledgable than the average Westerner. (In his follow-up book, "The World Until Yesterday", he attempts to capture some potential wisdom that tribal peoples have that he thinks modern society may have lost.)
It's this confusion between "primitive" and "stupid" that is exactly the harm that he cargo cult story creates and perpetuates.
Also, the tale may be apocryphal, but apocryphal tales (such as fairy tales) still can contain interesting insights about how humans behave. Maybe that's why they propagate through time.
But do you make it clear to those you tell the cargo cult story that it is supposed to be apocryphal?
Otherwise I can spread all kinds of made-up stories about my work mates, and claim they illustrate truths about human nature, right?
Yes, you actually can do this, and if those stories do reflect actual human nature that other people also observe then they will be shared and spread. If they warn of potential problems that really do sometimes happen and allow other people to avoid those problems then they will be useful, even if they were made up!
I guess we have quite different opinions on slander and defamation.
You're going to have a bad time when you learn just how much of fiction is loosely based on / exaggerations / distortions of people and events that the author knew or experienced.
And, yes, if it helps, you have my permission to tell your junior engineers how ol' imgabe, in his hubris, once deleted the master database and was chained to a rock by the gods to have his liver pecked out by eagles for all eternity.
I think you're misunderstanding what the GP was talking about.
If we worked together at a company, and I went to a bunch of junior new hires and said (falsely), "hey, let me tell you about the time imgabe deleted the production database, causing a week-long outage that lost us 20 of our customers", that would absolutely be defamation. That could even be legally actionable if you could prove that story was causing you harm (like perhaps clueless management heard and believed the story, and you were then passed up for promotion or a raise). Not saying that it would be easy to do so, but I personally think you'd be justified in being upset that someone made up a story like that about you. I have a reasonably thick skin, but I certainly wouldn't be pleased that a made-up story like that about me was circulating about me.
And even if you seriously wouldn't care about someone making up a story like that about you and using it as an object lesson at your workplace, assuming that no one would ever be offended or upset about that is... well, kinda shitty.
The point of the story is not to gloat and say "hahaha these stupid islanders are so dumb and we're so smart". The point is to illustrate a particular type of error and to make people aware that we, too, can make that very same error. That we are not, in fact, better and smarter, but rather the same and just as susceptible to the same errors.
The reason we use the story with the cargo cults is because the error is much easier to see from the other side, where you understand how the system actually works and you know why the things the islanders are doing won't actually result in any planes arriving. The point is that sometimes you are on the side the islanders are on where you are not understanding how the system works and you need to recognize that and work on understanding it and not just mindlessly imitating something.
This is obvious to anyone who is not walking around desperately searching for something to feel offended about.
(Sorry for bringing that side branch of the discussion into this one)
This happens all the time, and it’s fine? A recent front page example [0] — did julius ever exist? Who knows. Would it change anything? Not really…
A problem could definitely arise if you specifically called out a coworker without anonymization, but speaking in broad strokes is… perfectly fine and uneventful
[0] https://ploum.net/2024-12-23-julius-en.html
GP was talking about intentionally making up stories about real people, using their real names, and telling those stories to others who might actually even know the person in the false stories.
How can the fable of the tortoise and the hare teach us anything if a tortoise never actually raced a hare?
On the other hand, nobody thinks it actually did happen: it's understood to be ridiculously exaggerated to make a point. And there's not a specific named group of people who are implied to have actually been gullible enough to fall for the trick.
I find the actual cargo cult beliefs -- "our ancestors are sending us loads of cargo which the white people are stealing from us" -- in a way far more disturbing in a "teach us something about human psychology" way. Compare to, "There is loads of prosperity available, which {the government, the capitalists, immigrants} are stealing from us."
I'm sure there's lots of people who believe Einstein flunked grade school math even though he didn't. The point is more important though - flunking grade school math is not the end of the world and you can still be successful in life. Einstein's reputation is relatively unharmed by this fabrication.
FWIW, as a reasonably clever person (a paper I wrote in the course of my PhD got an ACM Hall of Fame award) who regularly got failing grades until I got into high school, I think that story about Einstein, if I heard it, only did me harm. I started putting in effort in high school sort of on accident. I wish someone would have kicked me in the ass much sooner, told me that nobody cares how smart you are if you don't get the job done, and that I'd better figure out how to make things happen or I'd be a wanna-be loser.
OTOH, it's said that people with dyslexia or other neurodivergences which cause them to struggle in school often make good entrepreneurs -- they're used to dealing with failure and used to working around their limitations to get things done.
Details matter.
I think maybe you don’t understand fables, or possibly stories in general.
I am sympathetic to this argument as I despise Lord of the Flies and always believed it was unrealistic, and was gratified recently to find that a similar real-life situation did occur and it did not turn out like the book at all.
However, in this case it did happen and that fact is seemingly not in dispute, as the article here uncritically quotes several sources describing cargo cult behavior matching Feynman's story almost exactly (Time Magazine and National Geographic). The main argument of this article seems to be that while there have been a couple of cases like this, there is a larger category of cargo cults which generally have other features and more complexity, though they are no less deluded overall. This argument falls flat for me. I don't see why this should be fatal to the metaphor.
For example, they were clearing the airstrips, not because they believed that doing so caused the cargo to appear, but simply to facilitate the delivery of the cargo if and when it came.
I'm not saying every cargo cult worked this way. I'm saying cargo cults that worked this way did exist according to the very sources quoted by the article, which it does not dispute.
But that's stretching the meaning of the word "similar" rather far. Those were six guys in their upper teens; the book was about tens (over a hundred? Can't recall) boys around ten - twelve - lower-teens. Huuuge difference.
The premise of the article is not at all that cargo cults never happened. Instead, the article acknowledges that cargo cults happened, but claims they are misunderstood and often ill-documented, and therefore unsuitable for software metaphors.
The "never happened" claim is waaaay stronger and likely no credible or serious observer would make the "never happened" claim.
I think it's kinda shitty to make up a pejorative story about a group of people to describe a bad practice. But it seems really dumb to take a real story about that group of people, and then completely misinterpret it (intentionally or otherwise) and use it in a way that makes no sense.
The same way fables and other fictional stories do. They contain an idea and communicate that idea to the listener. They deliberately pull away from the real world which is full of nuance and unnecessary details and present a story that contains the essence of the idea they're trying to convey to help make it clear.
Nobody believes that a goose that lays golden eggs exists, but they still get the idea that excessive greed can carry negative consequences from the fable. And they share that story as something they can refer to to express that notion. Feynman's story of the cargo cults is a fable just as well as Aesop's goose that laid the golden egg.
Also important, cargo cult mentality implies a inversion of cause and effect and a baseless and unsubstantiated assumption that correlated but irrelevant aspects are actually the root cause of a phenomenon. Such as building runways in the middle of nothing expecting that to be the trigger to have cargo dropped at your feet.
Perhaps not, but it is certainly defamation to ascribe specific pejorative acts to people when they never actually acted in that way.
> The cargo cult story, as it goes, simply describes the (in many ways fascinating) behavior of humans when faced with phenomena they are unable to understand, and how they derive their own interpretations of what happened.
I feel like we can do this in a way that doesn't create a false narrative about an entire group or class of people, no?
And regardless of that, how can a story describe human behavior if the story doesn't describe behavior that actually happened?
Except nothing in the cargo cult story is pejorative?
I mean, is it pejorative that ancient people worshipped the Sun as a God for bringing light and warmth to the world, not understanding what the Sun actually is? Religions were developed following that belief too.
I fail to see how it defames anything. Maybe the prejudice is in the eye of the observer in this case. Your disrespect for more primitive cultures makes you think their presumed behavior is detrimental to their intelligence.
> false narrative about an entire group or class of people, no?
First of all, it is not entirely clear that the story never happened. The accounts of cargo cults are disputed. I am simply giving it the benefit of doubt that the story may be apocryphal.
Second, the story does not paint a false narrative of anything. It just describes primitive cultures as primitive. Being primitive is not pejorative, it is merely descriptive. If you think it is pejorative, I suggest you spend some time reflecting on your prejudices.
> And regardless of that, how can a story describe human behavior if the story doesn't describe behavior that actually happened?
Have you ever read any fairy tale or old folktales? "The boy that called wolf"? "The emperor's new clothes"?
Perhaps you did not know, but those stories are fiction. Fictional stories can still contain allegories and insights on human behavior.
A weird notion, I know. The world is full of things like that.
Otherwise, then I guess we can stop studying psychology/sociology/anthropology/etc. and instead resort to making up stories all day to fill in what we do not know.
Give an example of a term we can use instead that is more accurate and useful, and you won't need a wall of words to try and fail to convince people to change.
...and the "Save" icon is still a floppy disk.
In my experience most software that still use an icon for saving these days are using an arrow pointing down to a horizontal line. This icon is usually similar or exactly the same as a download icon.
I think the core of the metaphor is still there, that a practice can pass into lore and performance, severed from their logic and context.
Here's Feynman's quote:
> So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land.
(note no mention of fake airplanes)
And here are historical instances from the actual article:
> They hacked airstrips in the rain forest, but no planes came.
...
> They created mock radio antennas of bamboo and rope to receive news of the millennium.
...
> The leader remains in communication with John Frum through a tall pole said to be a radio mast, and an unseen radio. (The "radio" consisted of an old woman with electrical wire wrapper around her waist, who would speak gibberish in a trance.)
That looks to me like cargo cult in the pop culture sense.
At some point the fake airplane illustrations were inaccurately tacked on, but if anything they give the cults too much credit because they depict high-quality replicas.
except ... it doesn't. Unless you already know what it means, the term "cargo cult XXX" conveys absolutely nothing. And for what its worth, I'm 61 years old, I've been programming computers for more than 35 years, and until I read TFA I really did not know what "cargo cult programming" meant.
On the other hand, "boiler plate code" made perfect sense to me, but I suspect suffers from the exact same problem.
If you work with people from a country where baseball is not popular you might find that the phrase "ballpark figure" doesn't mean anything to them. That doesn't mean we need a finger-wagging article about how nobody should ever say it.
Arguing that we should excuse them is absurd, especially when googling the phrase "cargo cult programming" immediately reveals the relevant information, all for a grand total of five seconds of effort.
It is both an expression and succinct, so long as you're willing to learn something new. Once you do, it can be used in the future for all similar circumstances.
Until some political weirdo recently went and defaced the wikipedia article on cargo cults, you could just google "cargo cult" and understand the analogy within 5 seconds.
“Boiler plate” is absolutely not the same, in that boiler plate is generally necessary and thus the correct thing to do, and there is no implication that one applies it without understanding.
Unless you already know what it means, 'nothing' conveys absolutely nothing.
Human languages are full of idioms that have origins that no longer relate at all to the way the terms are used. It doesn't make them wrong or less useful.
I mean, you can continue to use the cargo-cult term if you want; just tell an accurate story about the phenomenon that inspired it, that's all
And
> you should stop using it
Are different things.
Stand up and call out against how ridiculous this request is.
This is 2025.
Why the heated feelings? The cargo cult metaphor is not merely ignorant, it is also blatantly racist, which explains the unhinged resentment in your comment: "imaginary offenses" "supposedly marginalized people" "hallucinates"
You are being proudly and angrily ignorant specifically because the cargo cult metaphor is racist, and hence aligns along partisan politics, and hence makes you want to fight. If it was boiling frogs you'd be amenable to thinking and learning. Instead you're waving a MAGA flag.
And that is a good example. Despite the fact that the metaphor is not literally true it does a fine job of illustrating the idea of slowly acclimating to incremental changes.
Given how high this article is ranked, plenty of people are evidently receptive to it. Sorry!
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/let_a_thousand_flowers_bloom#...
[1] https://playjustsaying.com/idiom/let-a-thousand-flowers-bloo...
My only experience with the phrase is to mean something along the lines of a calculated ploy to lure dissidents into exposing themselves for later punishment. The horrible historical context is pretty much the entire point of making the allusion at all.
Taking it out of the superheated culture-war lens, let's examine a more chill example: There's a popular meme with a girl crying and pointing and a cat sitting at a table. After some number of years somebody online pointed out that the panel on the left is some reality-tv personality going through a genuinely terrible life experience. They were sort of implying that everybody on the internet should stop using the meme for this reason.
Most of the arguments in either direction have thus-far been name-calling (due to culture-war nature). I'd be curious to see a well-reasoned from-first-principles argument in either direction, though curiously never have.
It's OK not to know the hurtful etymology of something; it's also OK to be hurt by it and to educate those who don't know. To me the best way that this goes is that 'hurt party' kindly explains to 'unknowing party' who, in turn, kindly agrees to abandon hurtful term, and everyone moves on with life. What often happens however is either that unknowing party pushes back (often aggressively), imagining their rights to have been infringed, or else hurt party opens the discussion aggressively, perhaps anticipating pushback before it materialises, or perhaps just already upset at having long been on the receiving end of hurtful behaviour but previously unable to speak up, often because of systemic bias (think: oppression of black people in 1950's USA just as one example among many). And then we get a super-heated culture war, which is really just mixture of people wanting to be heard and understood, and some people deliberately stirring the pot for ulterior reasons.
The answer to your question is thus another question - do you care if people suffer because of the actions of others? If you do, then try to be kind, and remember that being kind sometimes means making minor sacrifices to bring greater benefit to others.
Another thing that happens quite often, especially in the context of online discussions, is that a third party opens the discussion aggressively and/or condescendingly, explaining how the phrase is unvirtuous and insisting that the first party renounce it.
> ...hurt party opens the discussion aggressively, perhaps anticipating pushback before it materialises, or perhaps just already upset at having long been on the receiving end of hurtful behaviour but previously unable to speak up, often because of systemic bias...
It's understandable that people on the receiving end of what you describe should react badly; however the compassionate approach is to try to listen first, understand that the aggression or condescension may be an attempt to control the conversation out of fear of not being heard (a fear which may be grounded in experience), or a kind of emotional exhaustion at having been on the receiving end of hurtful treatment for a long time already.
So, you're right, that's not a productive approach, but I think it's more important how someone moves forward from that; if they dig in and fight back, then all we get is a war. Actually this applies in any interaction where someone is behaving unpleasantly towards you; if you can contain your natural defensive reaction and show kindness in return, you will often find that the situation relaxes, and maybe that person is upset for totally unrelated reasons - perhaps you just crossed their path at a bad time. And again, it's not OK for someone to shout at you - but the compassionate response will often make the outcome better for both of you.
Case you're describing: Person1 makes a statement, Person2 demands that Person1 not act like this. Person2's manner is a little aggressive (in hindsight, understandably) because they've copped this too much in the past already, even if this instance isn't particularly egregious and a milder approach would have been more suitable.
Case I'm describing: Person1 makes a statement, Person3 starts aggressively demanding that Person1 not act like this due to the harm that it causes Person2, and instead conform to Person3's espoused 'correct' behaviour. Person3 is seeking social power by using Person2's alleged hurt as leverage, while Person2 may not even be aware of the interchange, let alone harmed by it.
I think if somebody directly offends you by calling you something you don't like, then from first-principles, it does seem like you're always okay letting them know that and seeing if they mind stopping. And most kind people would.
But in the meme-case it wasn't the lady in the meme asking people to stop, it was just some random girl on reddit. Same with the cargo-culting, I don't think the cargo-cults themselves are objecting, rather it is somebody objecting on behalf of another group.
Or the case of how we name our git-branches is even more indirect (since nobody is calling anybody anything, except a git-branch).
I'd love to hear some from-first-principles, emotionless arguments with clear proposals (e.g. If x% of people think term Y offends group Z, at what threshhold do we care? And does only group Z get to vote?).
In my experience a lot of these problems ultimately trace their cause back to some systemic imbalance that's often invisible to those on the 'winning' side of it. Take the idea of 'white privilege'; a lot of white people live in very poor or difficult circumstances, and probably don't feel privileged, but the real meaning of that phrase is that their situation would be even worse if they weren't white, and purely because of their appearance. So I think if you want proposals for dealing with these kinds of problem, then fixing the societal systems is where you want to look, rather than dealing with the proximate causes. Most of us can only work on the level of symptoms with this one though, hence my initial reply.
I perceive that the current state of language-policing is anarchy: anybody can all anything bad/harmful/problematic/ism etc. Often a small group suddenly decides that their personal judgments on language should be followed by all, and it makes the remaining majority bristle, particularly if they try to enforce it without bothering to make a compelling case and win popular support.
I perceived this blog-post to be one piece of noise in this free-for-all.
Perhaps it's time for a better system than anarchy -- such as setting a standard (majority vote of the affected group?).
This is not an attack on what you're saying and I'm not saying it even applies wholly right now, it just sticks out to me as a problem with any approach where "a majority of people publicly express an opinion" as a criteria.
What if the 'hurt party' is being unreasonable?
For an example - if you're familiar with The Expanse (great scifi if you like that sort of thing), then imagine you're a belter living on an asteroid, and for your whole life you've been called a 'skinny' by planet-dwelling types in a derogatory reference to your low-gravity physique, then one day someone calls you that without realising what it means except that's a common nickname for belters. The reasonable response from you would be to politely ask them not to, and explain why. The more likely response is one of anger at the insult, even if the other party intended no such insult. You're behaving in an apparently unreasonable way, but based on a lifetime of experience. The other person could return the hostility, then everyone is unhappy. Or they could respond with compassion, and the outcome would likely be much better for both of you.
The only argument for not using the meme here would be if _the actual girl in the meme_ wrote an open letter asking people not to use it publicly because every time she sees it she feels those emotions again or some such. I would definitely stop using it then--not that I use that meme to begin with, but that's really besides the point.
I don't care if some rando online wants to police speech. They have no power or right to do so. They are free to have an _opinion_, just as I am, because again, Freedom is a very important right. And they have no right to limit any of my rights, unless my exercise of some right infringed on a higher right of theirs e.g. I cannot claim to have the Freedom to negatively affect their Life.
And, importantly, I think some third-party claiming they are hurt by the use of that meme on behalf of the woman in the photo is not a tenable position. They could only do so if she had expressed the desire for people to stop using the meme, in which case it would still not make a difference whether such people felt hurt or not, but rather that the actual woman was hurt.
There's your argument from first principles. QED.
---
1. I'm handwaving this hierarchy of rights and the existence of natural rights, but hopefully it isn't too controversial to claim that the Life is the paramount right and Freedom should follow closely. I've thought long and hard about this and could never find a better hierarchy. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that every other right derives from just those two rights and their hierarchy relative to each other and to all other rights, but since I have no degree in Law or Philosophy to support such a claim robustly, I can only propose it as a thought experiment left as an exercise to the reader.
I believe such a claim can be robustly supported, and it is my hope to one day do so, ideally supported with a degree of philosophy. Your perspective is, in some ways, quite similar to my own, though it also has notable differences. I do believe it can be rigorously argued, for example, that Life is an outcome of Free Will, not the other way around. I believe it can also be shown that Privacy (not the cybernetic privacy, or cyberprivacy, articulated with privacy policies, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA) is (a) distinct from Free Will, (b) uniquely allows for the expression and development of Free Will, and (c) that maximal expression of Free Will is the global optimum for Life.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastering_(audio)
Speaking of recipes, the article very much reminded me of internet recipes, the ones that try to cram in as many ads as possible. So the recipe is preceded by the writer's life history, the history of the recipe, whether the name of the product is politically correct and then (200 ads later) three lines of the stuff you were really looking for. And in the worst circumstances you find that the core thing was not really all that informative. Sigh.
___
[1]: Agile is an adjective, not a noun.
The unfortunate thing is that the tag word "agile" in this context has obliterated some very sound ideas of how to effectively develop software in teams. But that would require actual thinking. In lieu of that, maybe we should just get some kind of high priests to run the scrum meetings? Sorry. I have been in the software business way, way too long.
If anyone actually wants to think about software development, my starting point would be John Holland's "Hidden Order". Don't read it. Try to implement it for software development teams.
My new mantra: If the Scrum Shaman doesn't have a feathered mask, a rattle with bones in it, and a small fire for burning pieces of sacrificial goat meat, they're obviously a fraud and I ain't participating.
In some cases it's a confusion be correlation and causality.
Aspects of "sympathetic magic" are definitely present the quasi-religious beliefs of cargo cults (John Frum, etc. [2]), granted they are also political and social movements.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_magic
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Frum
I wouldn't say confusion. If you read Ramsey Dukes for example, a magician focusing on correlation rather than causation is the whole point. The belief is that a) there are non-causal aspects to existence; and b) it doesn't matter why it works, so long as it works.
That is, according to Dukes, a magician is intentionally uninterested in causation, and leaves it for the scientists to worry about.
I think “cargo culting” in the popular sense means little more than that (whereas actual cargo culting is much more complex, as the featured article describes).
[0] https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/postmoder...
something happened but you’re not sure why, so you guess it’s because of something you did, and you decide to ritualistically repeat what you did in the hopes that thing that happened before happens again.
It’s a misunderstanding of cause and effect - so when you repeat the cause, looking to repeat the effect, you’re puzzled that it doesn’t work this time.
1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Wovoka
My point is similar to other high-ranked points on this thread, I just didn't feel like gussying it up.