It's time to abandon the cargo cult metaphor
righto.com64 points by zdw 9 hours ago
64 points by zdw 9 hours ago
Nah, we better abandon this kind of retroactive policing of language instead from people with nothing better to do.
Nobody who uses the term "cargo cult" in a technical settings does it out of spite or even refers to specific nations or peoples. Just refers to the core takeaway of a practice which might as we be all lore.
Care about politics and colonialism and injustice and what have you? There are 1000000 causes you could devote your time and make an active difference to people actually suffering this very moment, rather than language policing tech terms.
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
> 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.
> How can it teach us anything about human psychology if it never actually happened?
How can the fable of the tortoise and the hare teach us anything if a tortoise never actually raced a hare?
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.
>> "...it never actually happened?"
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.
> 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.
> 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?
I think so, yes. I used the "height of our reason" phrase a bit ironically.
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.
> 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.
"Defamation" is well-defined in the legal system, and anyone is able to seek the remedy of damages through the courts if they wish to.
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.
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.
I'd say in 2025 understanding historical context and questioning passively acquired meme-knowledge are more important than ever.
> It succinctly expresses
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.
Idioms are, by definition, not self describing.
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.
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.
> except ... it doesn't.
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.
So you're uninterested in the fact that things just didn't happen the way the cargo-cult story says?
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
Possibly the one good thing that will come from all the Tech CEOs schmoozing Trump, is that they'll stop pandering to this sort of pointless virtue signalling.
2025, the year in which we stop reflecting on our habits and instead entrench ourselves into tradition. What a brave new world.
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.
Yep, "copy/paste programming" is a separate term for the version that works without being understood.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> That's about the time people started saying things like "drink the Koolaid" in a positive sense
wait, when was this? is there a linkable example? (i don't doubt you, but that's pretty bad)
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.
It never sat right with me. Every time someone used this metaphor, an argument ensued over whether it was accurately applied or not.
What are some good alternatives to express the same concept?
“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).
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.
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.
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.
You mean it never happened, or not all in one single cargo cult?
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.
So using cargo cult metaphor is considered a carbo cult?
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.
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.
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.
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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 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.
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?).
> 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 if the 'hurt party' is being unreasonable?
> 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.
Yes; as I said:
> ...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.
It’s not stupid if it works
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?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce
edit: typo
Author here. This is a change from my usual reverse engineering articles, but hopefully you'll find it interesting...
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?
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".
In any case, I enjoyed reading the history too.
> 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."
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've installed 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."
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.
I absolutely loved it. Keep up the good work! Well researched, thoughtful and balanced. What more to ask for ?
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.
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 anecdote does not even need to be true at all. but in this case it isn't too far off, depending on the story telling. Feynman's short description doesn't seem as extreme as what is described as the "pop-culture" definition.
- it can certainly be told in a way that is very culturally insensitive. i think this could also be done in a more neutral manner, but it's something to be careful of for sure. certainly, sticking closer to the history would probably improve things, however this may be the achilles heel. (in other words, out of all the reasons for abandonment given, i'm most convinced by this one)
- the biggest issue, for me, left is this: what do you recommend replacing this with if we avoid it altogether? the imagery of religious behavior is a big part of what that analogy covers. and the ideas of observing something and then copying those behaviors to achieve a result without any real understanding.
anyhow, thank you for a very thought provoking article. i'm clearly not as good of a communicator as you are (or Feynman).
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
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.
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!
Bookmarking to read after I fix this bug on my master branch.
You don't do fixes on a side branch and then create a Pull Request to ask someone else to merge it?
honestly, "main" is more descriptive of a branch (as are leader/follower for DB nodes). but I guess some folks are adamant about being terrible.
The master branch has nothing to do with the master/slave relationship and everything to do with the concept of mastering [1].
What is more terrible, using the master branch, or calling somebody terrible for doing so?
Can we keep “tilting at windmills” then?
I assume that's evolved to mean something about opposing renewables these days?
See also, the prophet Wovoka and the Ghost Dance in North America.
..and replace it with dogma.
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.
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.
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NOOOO you can't hypothetically offend random tribes from 70 years ago! That's insensitive! Replace this highly useful linguistic phrase to describe very real human behavior with nothing!
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.
> Feynman's characterization of cargo cults is inaccurate
I don’t think that the post really supports that idea at all. It was incomplete, perhaps, but does not sound inaccurate.
> 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.