The origin of the cargo cult metaphor
righto.com291 points by zdw 2 months ago
291 points by zdw 2 months ago
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.
Yeah, that quote is very far off I think.
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.
Yep, "copy/paste programming" is a separate term for the version that works without being understood.
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”.
The article would be so much better if it was called "The origin of the cargo cult metaphor" instead of the rage inducing "It's time to abandon the cargo cult metaphor".
Instead of just providing valuable historical context, educating people and letting them decide for themselves what to do with it, it devolves into a sermon. As a result, most of the comments are a sterile discussion about social justice instead of the actual history of what we refer to as a cargo cult.
I am sure this article is very successful with algorithmically-driven social networks, great engagement. Unfortunately the kind of engagement that makes people dumber when it could have made them smarter.
Normally we probably would have changed the title in that way, and I feel like we failed kens, who is one of the best article-writers ever to have contributed content to Hacker News. He probably had no idea how his carefully researched and super-interesting work would snap to the grid of culturewar deathbattle. I'm certain that was not what he intended.
It's our job, not the job of a kens, to mitigate ragey internet side effects. The job of a kens is to turn his attention wherever he pleases and summarize his fascinating findings for the rest of us. I just wasn't online enough yesterday to do my job. Sorry Ken.
I am continuously stunned by how thin-skinned people are these days. A sermon? Good Lord, it’s a bog standard call-to-action essay title of the kind you’d pen in English class. You don’t have to mentally append “(And You’re a Bad Person If You Don’t)” to the end of it.
By the way, the article has an addendum:
> Update: well, this sparked much more discussion on Hacker News than I expected. To answer some questions: Am I better or more virtuous than other people? No. Are you a bad person if you use the cargo cult metaphor? No. Is "cargo cult" one of many Hacker News comments that I'm tired of seeing? Yes (details). Am I criticizing Feynman? No. Do the Melanesians care about this? Probably not. Did I put way too much research into this? Yes. Is criticizing colonialism in the early 20th century woke? I have no response to that.
It's not that the skin is thin, but that the muscle is tired. Our muscle (or sense) of guilt has been overused and abused. Now it's prone to inflammation when we hear people who intentionally or unintentionally trigger it.
I think the irritation towards guilt may look like rage but I think it's a weary hopelessness. No matter what is done, history cannot be undone. It cannot be forgotten and many people feel it can't even be made right anymore. All the guilt of recent history did not lead to a new Civil Rights Act, it did not change the Constitution. And any of the good that was done to right history in the 20th century-- many claim it only belongs to yesterday's victims.
Those with the wrong ancestors are stuck in their sin waiting for history to be twisted & jabbed into them by their neighbors, who wish to ease or to glorify their own individual conscience.
IMO, the cycle breaks only when there's hope of true, genuine forgiveness that MLK preached and LBJ effected. But that forgiveness is beyond human power.
I this post has enabled me to put my finger on what makes me uncomfortable about articles like this.
Even though I frequently understand and sympathise with the goals and feelings of the writers, there are two factors that stand out.
1. A sense of certainty of the causal nature of the issues at hand. It comes across that the author has concluded the correct course of action.
2. Everybody, including you, should follow their concluded course of action.
I would be fine with an article talking about what the cargo cult metaphor means, its historical accuracy and how the author thinks that impacts upon people. It would then seem to be quite reasonable for them to say that they are going to cease using the metaphor because of those reasons, and to invite people to consider doing the same if they think the reasons seem valid to them.
It's ok to say
"I think this, so I'm going to change my behaviour"
It seems unreasonable to say.
"I think this, so everyone should change their behaviour"
Unfortunately it feels like we are heading to
"I know this, so everyone should change their behaviour"
The call for everyone else to change is backed by the certainty of their opinion. It presents complainants as wanting you to do their thing not because it's their opinion, it's because it is undeniable fact. It places you as morally deficient if you disagree.
This affects things large and small, whether people want you to boycott a brand of toothpaste, or talk about milliBTC as the base unit of bitcoin, or talk about the topic they are uninterested in in a different forum. The solution is simple, everyone has to do this simple act of my bidding.
Surely if the case for the damage caused by the cargo cult metaphor were to be made clearly and undeniable, people would not need to be told to stop using it, They just would.
That's almost every article on HN, though. Don't use inheritance, don't use C, use Kubernetes, don't use Kubernetes, etc etc.
I suspect the thing that's bothering people in the comments here isn't as much that the author is making an argument but that the author is making an argument on cultural grounds?
People are fed up with the constant identity-politics culture-war bait. Mainstream news is already full of that stuff. HN in general is far more interested in the technical articles of the author.
It's kind of fun because any comment can be stated in a an objectionable way, I think.
"Don't talk about identiy politics and things that seem like "dentity-politics culture-war bait".
It's a fun game. You could do the same thing to this comment if you chose.
I don't like Kant, but there might be something to the principle of unverisality...
The difference being that the culture isn't awash in people demanding adherence to Kant. It seems that every time someone voices an objection to the tiresome identity-politics that is so prevalent today, others will ensure the conversation devolves into a discussion of slippery definitions and pedantic dismissals of the complainant's understanding.
The truth is, _many_ people are fed up with the dominant leftist dogma that permeates almost every area of culture, government, and the economy today. We can argue until the sun goes down about the nature and specifics of what that entails, but people are reacting to _something_; it does exist, irrespective of any failure to describe it well.
It's not leftist dogma. Leftists aren't capitalists, friend. Hard to argue the government and economy are post capitalist.
And most leftists I know absolutely hate performative progressivism. Dems are widely mocked in leftist circles for doing stunts but not doing anything to help. Like Pelosi wearing Kente cloth while doing nothing to aid African people.
So please, you might actually have people who agree with you in the leftist camp, stop bundling us with the Dems.
That conflation of dems/leftists is central to one side of the "identity-politics culture-war bait". They aren't going to stop doing it.
However, when folks do it, you know that they are just un-self-critically engaging in something that they putatively dislike in other folks.
Not to get to annoying on the topic, but I do find it fun to unpack.
Ironically, the hated "I know this, so everyone should change their behaviour" position is central to the idea that "we [HN] are fed up with the constant identity-politics culture-war bait."
That claim is about who "we" are, and it's stated with a great deal of certainty, even if there is a bit of cowardly rhetorical hedging.
And that claim is supposedly consistent because the claimant has over-determined the "we":
so that claimant isn't making a universal statement, just a statement of "I" and the "We" to which that "I" belongs.
Which seems like a pretty normal move- notice the concern with "_many_ people" and the demand that we don't look too far into what that population might actually mean.
I've been on HN for a decade, have some karma, and no, I am not part of that "we" apparently- a fact for which I am grateful, as I am grateful I don't feel compelled to vote for capitalist Democrats.
Still, I think that it really is worth not looking too deeply into what they are saying because their point will be lost: they get to say who "we" are and what kinds of things "We" are sick of, and they don't feel bad about it because it's not univeral, so the cowardly hedging that they did means they aren't being hypocritical.
I personally don't care if folks are hypocrites though, because it makes for a pretty cool set of tea leaves to read about where folks minds are at.
I come here specifically because I try not to hang out with the kinds of sociopaths that wreak havoc on my world via badly implemented technology, but it's an easy place to check their general mental weather.
So, yeah, they aren't gonna agree, see the internal contraditions, understand the distance between lefitsts and performative DEI folks, etc.
But, happily for me, they will keep displaying their terrible opinions so I don't have to rebuild connections with real-life assholes just to keep my ear to the ground about what horrible new thing is coming to our world.
I thought the article was interesting and informative even though I won't recoil at use of the term. Getting upset at the authors opinion is just as useless as getting upset about the thing they complain about, but boy do these comments do the former.
This seems to be a characteristic of many high functioning people, especially successful engineers. There is a "correct" way of living your life, conducting your business, using your text editor, etc. It's helpful in that it ensures consistency and focus. The downside is that people become desensitised to nuance.
In this particular example, the word cargo in cargo cult is redundant. All cults have ridiculous ceremonies for cult members to engage in. These ceremonies come from human nature, our inability to distinguish correlation from causation. We're told to conduct a ceremony, get a good outcome, then believe it's the ceremonies that caused the outcome. Just call them ceremonies, because that's what they are.
However, when Feynman wrote his speech he must have thought that a cargo cult is a much more graphic metaphor than a dry lecture about stats and human biases.
Cargo cults are a specific kind of cult where the ceremonies come from imitating some other community. And complaints about cargo cult programming aren't only about people doing ineffective things, it's also about people seeing someone else doing something effectively but then not doing the work to understand why it's effective. It's a complaint about people being so close to being much more effective, but then snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Did you read the article? That is very much the pop sci definition of cargo cult that is incorrect.
The cargo cults were made by people who were enslaved and violently oppressed and then believed that cargo they were forced to create for their oppressors (e.g. flour, rice, tobacco, and other trade) should belong to them
> believed that cargo they were forced to create for their oppressors
I'm not sure that was in the article was it? These were exotic goods brought from overseas.
I'm not trying to say there was no oppression, but the examples in which they believed the trade goods should belong to them were still about trade goods which arrived by boat.
"[The leader proclaimed] that the ancestors were coming back in the persons of the white people in the country and that all the things introduced by the white people and the ships that brought them belonged really to their ancestors and themselves."
(edit - certainly these goods may well have been produced through the oppression of other peoples elsewhere!)
It's easy for people who get paid to think to overthink things. He's overthinking it.
It's hard enough for people to communicate as it is. Now we're being asked to research the ancient history, etymology and moral underpinnings of words and phrases when all we really want to do is communicate with our colleagues. I think it's okay to use any word or phrase as long as everyone knows what it means, and accurate communication has been achieved.
People who find themselves with more time and money than sense on their hands have the privilege of writing articles like this. That's wonderful. Good for him. I'm happy for him. The rest of us can just carry on like we never read that article because although it's quite interesting, it's also absolutely useless.
> Unfortunately it feels like we are heading to
> "I know this, so everyone should change their behaviour"
Depending on which avenues of the web you were on more than 10 years ago, even if that was some of the side streets on Tumblr or Twitter or whatever, we long ago already reached that point. It’s just gotten progressively more mainstream with each passing year, but the backlash was always going to come, and we’re living it.
Or, depending on who you conversed with at the forum...
How do we disprove the null hypothesis that this is a part of human nature and there have always been and will always be people that state their opinions as fact to be more persuasive, and that those voices tend to dominate over the more tempered ones?
Well, it's one thing to do it for these silly and easy examples, but how about :
"Surely if the case for the damage caused by smoking / drugs / climate change / platforms were to be made clearly and undeniable, people would not need to be told to stop using it, They just would."
But they don't, typically because this involves doing very hard changes in their lives.
So, you have to keep the pressure for decades (or even centuries) of the "I know this, so everyone should change their behaviour" kind, if you want to have any hope for the behaviours to change.
And at some point, it just becomes tiresome to always have to debate this, you know ? (How long can you can keep debating with people who think that aspects of fascism / Putin's behavior is good ?)
Anyway, I will keep publicly shaming the kind of developer scum who in 2025 still uses the likes of GitHub / Discord / LinkedIn, and doesn't even have the decency to admit there might be something problematic with them.
>"Surely if the case for the damage caused by smoking / drugs / climate change / platforms were to be made clearly and undeniable, people would not need to be told to stop using it, They just would."
Smoking - undeniable, but addictive. Yet despite the difficulty in quitting, smoking is in decline. Many smokers have tried to quit. They don't need more hectoring, they need support.
Climate Change - Broad consensus is not the same as undeniable. Rapidly becoming undeniable. Change is happening, belatedly, and perhaps too late, but it is occurring.
Drugs - Far too broad a category to be undeniable in practically any aspect. Definitely disagreement on the correct course of action on every aspect.
Platforms - even more nebulous. Harms are alleged for many platforms but those claims are still a long way from being undeniable, yet the exodus from certain platforms would suggest that people leave when they feel the need.
>And at some point, it just becomes tiresome to always have to debate this, you know ?
Forcing your will on others because getting them to agree with you has become tiresome, does not seem to me, to be a productive way to change minds.
> (How long can you can keep debating with people who think that aspects of fascism / Putin's behavior is good ?)
As long as it takes, with reason, information, and compassion.
>Anyway, I will keep publicly shaming the kind of developer scum who in 2025 still uses the likes of GitHub / Discord / LinkedIn, and doesn't even have the decency to admit there might be something problematic with them.
I struggle to see the difference between shaming and bullying. Declaring people to be scum because they use a service you have a problem with just alienates them. When you have provided a list of services that includes so many people you declare to be scum. You have done even more than that. You have alienated yourself.
I would like to think that I stand on my principles. I have never had a FaceBook or LinkedIn account. I do not, however, vilify those who make different decisions from myself.
An odd aspect of much of this how I have always thought of myself as a very left-wing person, yet I found myself increasingly distant from people proclaiming themselves to be left-wing. The principles I value that leads to me to feel left wing are compassion, inclusion, freedom, and support. I can't reconcile those values with people who declare themselves to be lefties to seem to be so opposed to them.
Recently someone posted a George Orwell quote on HN.
It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.
Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.
Now it seems a lot of people do their bullying in the name of fighting Fascism while seeing Fascism in the myriad forms of things theey disagree with.
One of the characteristics that led Steve Rogers to be selected for Captain America was his answer to the question
"Do you want to kill Nazis?"
His response,
"I don't want to kill anyone, but I don't like bullies; I don't care where they're from."
The writer of those lines had a message about what it meant to be a good person.
Please have compassion. Instead of calling-out or publicly shaming, have a one-on-one conversation, listen and understand their position, explain your own.
Those are all great points, but it's not all that simple, because of the Paradox of Tolerance (Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), and others).
And those values of yours (and I guess, mine too) are probably even more bottom wing than left wing : and as you well know there have been scores of left wing anti-liberal regimes in the last two centuries, with plenty of disastrous results.
(With the extra issue that 'liberal' also sometimes stands for right-wing, under a quite different meaning.)
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And I'm not a saint, so there's also aspects of both lashing out because social trends make you feel like in a box that is closing in, and also self-flagellation because of sometimes being tempted into using platforms (with their addictive features and social benefits).
(Also of course some platforms are less problematic than others.
Also, there's an extra aspect when most of the platforms are from a foreign country (USA) that has been sliding in an anti-liberal direction (on their 'left' too) for many decades now. Why tolerate these platforms when you don't even have indirect democratic control over their companies ?)
But yeah, compassion and "cultivate your own garden first".
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.
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[1]: Agile is an adjective, not a noun.
Nice one! Ceremonies! I like that.
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.
I think that “cargo cult” in how it’s commonly used encapsulates a certain kind of behaviour pretty well. If it was to be moved away from, then I’d at least like a similarly concise alternative.
Though I will admit, especially as a non-native English speaker, that there have been cases where changes in the terminology used have actually made more sense than the prior alternatives.
For example allowlist/deny list feels more concise and simpler to understand than whitelist/blacklist.
Also, naming the main version control branch “main” is also really obvious and clear, at least a bit more so than “master”.
Though once you start talking about further historical context, you’re going to lose some people along the way, who have not once considered it with much attention. A bit like some who used .io domains had never really heard much about Chagos.
The problem with “denylist/allowlist” is that the semantics of “blacklist/whitelist” are broader in practice than what that can convey.
In the general case, blacklists and whitelists relate to operations on non-enumerable sets. In particular, blacklists and whitelists are not invertible, due to that non-enumerability i.e. you can’t generate a blacklist from a whitelist nor vice versa. So whitelists exclude a non-enumerable set and blacklists include a non-enumerable set. It is a useful concept separate from purely enumerable sets.
Many uses of whitelist/blacklist in practice have nothing to do with “allowing” or “denying”. You can use some explicit set inclusion/exclusion term but that isn’t nearly as concise and everyone already knows what a whitelist/blacklist is.
I mean, if that’s true I imagine they also don’t have much to do with the colors “black” or “white” either, right? Language changes all the time. I think for most software folks, who aren’t dealing with set theory, allowlist and denylist work pretty well. That’s been my experience, anyway.
I'm also a non-native English speaker.
Blacklist is a word that stands out, an interesting combination like other English words or phrases and I had no issues with learning it. It's also a word with a rich history that doesn't seem to have had a racist origin. And because it was used since 17th century and is still in use, non-native English speakers have to learn it anyway.
"Master" was more legitimate as a target for change, but again, I don't think anyone had issues with understanding it. This is like when mother-father or male-female is used to describe electrical connectors.
And also, the bigger problem with changing "master" to "main" is that "master" was a standard and the change was painful. At work our branch is still called "master", any change won't happen soon, as people have better things to do (needing to reconfigure CI, plus red tape due to policies and ACL policies) . So now people have to be aware that the default can be both "master" and "main", increasing the knowledge one has to possess for no good reason. It's not like the change from "master" increased the quality of life for anyone.
Note that I have no issues with changes that are made for clarification. For example, in database replication, maybe it's better to talk of a primary database and of replicas, which seems more descriptive and aids learning. But I don't think many such changes were motivated primarily by the need to clarify, but by the need to sanitize the language and I disagree with such a motivation.
> Blacklist is a word that stands out, an interesting combination like other English words or phrases and I had no issues with learning it.
Sure, though I think that if there's a term that conveys more or less the same thing and is even more obvious, then there's probably some utility in using it! Though maybe that's from a programming perspective, where accidental complexity compounds somewhat.
> And also, the bigger problem with changing "master" to "main" is that "master" was a standard and the change was painful.
This is a good argument, especially if it was done in a top down fashion and a bunch of people suddenly found themselves needing to change things in addition to an already significant workload.
In the case of the teams that I worked on, the projects that already existed often saw no changes (because the impact of it being either way was non-existent on a day to day level), but for new projects the main repo branch often defaulted to "main" and there wasn't much past "Oh hey, that's neat" to consider.
I can't say that it actually caused me any difficulties, because both Git on the CLI and in my GUI tools helpfully shows the branch names and it's not like we copy the CI configuration without reviewing it on a case by case basis (then again, in some projects the branching strategy is such that master/main isn't even used since there is no canonical main branch).
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.
> It succinctly expresses an important concept.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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
> 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!
So I can claim you once deleted the master database (although you never did), and use that to warn juniors who join to be careful?
I guess we have quite different opinions on slander and defamation.
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.