The origin of the cargo cult metaphor
righto.com
righto.com
> 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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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...
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.
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.
> "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.
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?
"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.
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.
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".
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.
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[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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
...and the "Save" icon is still a floppy disk.
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.
Stand up and call out against how ridiculous this request is.
This is 2025.
Given how high this article is ranked, plenty of people are evidently receptive to it. Sorry!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
HN seems put off by the tone. Perhaps if he had positioned it more like "People who use the term 'cargo cult' are mostly idiots who have no idea what it really means. I went all the way down the rabbit hole to uncover the truth for you dumbasses. Now you too can sneer at your colleague for trying to sound smart and miserably failing."
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.
The author literally describes a cargo cult constructing bamboo radios to receive messages from spirits. That is perfectly described as imitating the outward appearance of methods one doesn't truly understand.
I would not describe cargo cult programming as something that works for reasons unknown. Indeed, the worst instances I've seen do not work at all, completing the metaphor.
The pop-sci omits some detail and the author takes issue with that. Sure, the precise origin is misattributed (is anything more American than thinking it all started with us?). But I do not think an astute reader would fail to realize that the islanders' misunderstandings come at great personal cost. That is what makes it serve as a great cautionary tale. They obviously had far better things to do than to construct these ritualistic trappings. And that actually happened!
> People were kidnapped and forced to work as laborers in other countries, a practice called blackbirding. Prime agricultural land was taken by planters to raise crops such as coconuts for export, with natives coerced into working for the planters. Up until 1919, employers were free to flog the natives for disobedience; afterward, flogging was technically forbidden but still took place. Colonial administrators jailed natives who stepped out of line.
> The natives were saying that the spirits of their ancestors had appeared to several in the villages and told them that all flour, rice, tobacco, and other trade belonged to the New Guinea people, and that the white man had no right whatever to these goods
These "cargo cults" are not a cult of people who think of these cargo as magical gifts. They are well aware of the socioeconomic forces that oppress them. They are cults of people who think that they are rightfully owed these goods
How is that in any way similar to the pop sci definition?
> During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. 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
Incomplete? Yes, since the practice predated planes. But it is accurate to say that the cults persisted during / after WW2 and that cargo from colonial powers drew the (understandable!) envy of the cultists. And it is undeniable that they undertook rituals to obtain cargo, and that those rituals could not have worked.
>New Guinea people, and that the white man had no right whatever to these goods
And believed their ancestors were going show up on a cargo ship with free stuff. In the same way the oppressors came.
Yes, these came later according to TFA, and yes, there are dark undertones and overtones throughout, but if you read the article I'm not sure how you can argue that Feynman's version bears no similarity to fact. It's basically in TFA verbatim.
The only thing they really claim Feynman was missing was context.
A person could perfectly well understand how radios work, while still constructing bamboo ones to receive messages from spirits.
On the whole though I think the pop-culture understanding rated as "true enough" to merit use of the phrase, and I was not convinced that the phrase is particularly hurtful to any particular group of people, partly because it is so disconnected from that and it's not really a slur or anything but more of a historical lesson or anecdote.
I bristled at this kind of prescriptive language dictum for a long time, but eventually I concluded the rule-of-thumb "don't use derogatory metaphors about other people" is often not hard or that big of a deal. I couldn't give you an alternative for cargo cult, though. It's wild to see the emotions it apparently still triggers on this site, it's not a big deal either way.
This is simply untrue.
A couple of decades ago, one could use the hyperbolic euphemism “I would of course be lynched for suggesting such a thing”, completely devoid of any racial animus, because human history is of course rife with instances of lynchings of people of all skin tones and racial origins. But today, a concerted effort has been made to “brand” “lynch” as a term that is “racist against black people—black Americans specifically.” There is no historical reason for this to be the case. The ADL was founded after a Jewish man was lynched because the lynch mob believed him to be guilty instead of a black man, for instance!
Just because a given term or metaphor or euphemism isn't considered offensive-toward-a-certain-class-of-people today, doesn't mean that somebody won't invent a reason for it to be considered to be such tomorrow.
This is nice. Thanks for putting it so succinctly.
I've been surprised by how strong the push back has been from people about this kind of thing. We're in a weird place culturally when "golden rule" or "default to respectful" approaches are called out as virtue signaling and idiotic. Maybe that's just the impression leftover from the silent middle on both sides not starting a judgmental shouting match so it's just the "only my way can possibly be right" people on both sides of the issue taking up all the air in the room.
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.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/let_a_thousand_flowers_bloom#...
[1] https://playjustsaying.com/idiom/let-a-thousand-flowers-bloo...
Whereas I'm not sure what point this article is supposed to make. I guess the info-dumping is meant to communicate that Feynman's offhand two sentences are not a complete and accurate representation of a diverse religious movement, which I think most people could have figured out themselves.
But if all this info is meant to show that the roots of the movement are more complex than Feynman indicates, I think it does terrible job without mentioning the gift economy aspect. I think this is partly a result of relying on older sources - but then again, study of reciprocity in Melanesian cultures is as old as modern anthropology, so...??
In a nutshell, these cultures relied upon reciprical exchange of gifts to define the social order. When the Japanese and Americans arrived and distributed valuable goods which the natives were completely unable to reciprocate, the entire community lost their collective social status. In order to cope with this, it was rationalized that these goods actually belonged to ancestor spirits and had been somehow co-opted by the Americans. This is the reason 'cargo cults' take diverse forms - they are just a reaction to the sudden appearance of foreign cargo within an existing socio-religious framework.
Incidentally, we had a 10 minute meeting to 80 staff where someone tried to explain that we ought not use the word 'guys' on grounds that it could feel exclusive to some. Thankfully, it was pointed out that the literal definition of guys is: [Informal] Persons of either sex [0], which is what most perceive it to be. I don't think anyone's behaviour was changed as a result, but the seemingly trifling disruption did irritate a fair few people, and it was 10 minutes we never got back.
> the literal definition of guys is: Persons of either sex
I'm no culture warrior, but this isn't accurate at all. That's a definition, but it's not the usual one - ask someone "how many guys have you slept with?" and see how they interpret it.
To me, "guys" is the rhetorical equivalent of a code smell. There are cases where is obviously innocuous, like saying "hey you guys" to a mixed group of peers. But when the CEO says "I want to congratulate the guys on team xyz" in reference to a team with one woman... at minimum we can say his intent is ambiguous.
Similarly to the article above, during the meeting, no alternative was suggested. I like the word 'guys' for its casualness. If you're at risk of being perceived as somewhat authoritative, it can help induce a more casual tone. I thought about 'peeps' but that's too casual (and frankly weird, in a business setting). 'Everyone' is far too sterile. 'Ladies and gentlemen' is weird. 'All' (e.g. 'hi all') is also impersonal.
Workplaces could over-analyse and pick about minutiae all day long, and how productive is that? I reasoned that if we are going to pick about minutiae, then it should at least be the worst of the worst offences, and should be accompanied with some alternatives or solutions. Not just "Don't do <x> because I said so" type of thing.
The author deliberatly reaches outside of these scopes to contruct an argument that circumvents the situational semantics.
This feels like another attempt of non-constructive language policing, contributing nothing more than deconstruction without improvement.
I didn’t succumb to the pressure of heresy. I simply grew up and realized that it wasn’t actually that useful of a tool for explaining first principles or encouraging people to learn things from a first principles perspective.
My experience was: If a person felt like they already identified as someone who understands idea from first principles, the cargo cult story didn’t incentive them to question their understanding.
I also found if the person didn’t identify as someone who understood things from first principles, then the implication that they were implicitly being compared to clever primitive people. It wasn’t exactly reassuring and motivating.
At some point, people need to grow up and realize these conversations aren’t always about trying to censor people or to construct new heresies to use as instruments of cancellation.
Sometimes we need to have these conversations so we can reflect on what we say, how our words make people feel, and if they’re actually effective at accomplishing what we hoped those ideas would accomplish.
Zoom out and look at the bigger picture.
That there is *NO* gap between theory & practice.
Sounds familiar?? I cant find it now, someone please help?
EDIT:
And Programmers, unlike Cargo Cult Psychotherapists of TFA's source, do quantitatively try to make deals with the spirits (in the machine)???
"In theory there is a difference between theory and practice - in practice there isn't"
-- Not [Comrade] Yogi Berra
The real reason to stop using the catch-phrase is that it no longer has much power. When Feynman used it, it grabbed people's attention. It was a way of saying "this is religion, not science". But endless repetition has diluted its effect. Better to just say "practices based on tradition or faith rather than understanding and demonstrated efficacy tend to under-perform", or something in that vein.
Or think up a new metaphor. Overused metaphors stop being effective.
Feynman was a consistent asshole, the term is not the best, but you're going too far on your sensibilities to the point that you're not reasonable anymore (hint: Melanesians need to defend their culture, not you).
Chanring your words without changing the white messiah attitude means nothing.
Side note: this is true of most religions throughout history. Bret Devereaux has a great series on this [0]. The bulk of religions throughout history and space more closely resemble what we would consider to be a magic system than they do the Abrahamic religions or Buddhism. They're fundamentally a practical set of rituals that were/are believed to have practical effects, irrespective of belief or morality.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polythei...
This is especially true in mainline protestantism, which rejects most forms of ritual altogether.
When people accuse evangelicals or whatnot of magical thinking they're not talking about the same thing that I'm talking about here.
> I was raised Baptist, and my parents attribute pretty much any good fortune for our family to divine intervention, to this day.
This is similar in some respects, but a key difference is that for most Baptists they don't believe that the Divine intervention came by performing a specific ritual. It comes by the will of God through the grace of Christ. Many Baptists will even firmly emphasize that your morality plays no role in whether God will intervene, so even the moral component doesn't serve the role of ritual.
> I know Catholics who can instantly name the patron saint who can be asked to intercede on just about any topic.
Catholicism in general is an exception to this, especially as practiced in places like Latin America. There, there is a large ritual component that does bear a strong resemblance to these kinds of religions.
But it's easier to warn people from extrapolating from Abrahamic religions in general than it is to warn people from extrapolating from "Evangelicalism, Protestantism, Islam, Judaism, ...". The exceptions will be discovered, as long as you can interrupt the initial impulse to immediately associate things with what you already understand.
Mind you, I'm dreading what the next form of witch hunting will be...
When you observe someone publicly doing something that they think is virtuous, why is your first assumption that they’re broadcasting it cynically, rather than that they’re simply being virtuous in a public setting? Most people don’t think that way.
I have no problem with the majority of a group directly affected by a nomenclature requesting a change. Where I start to have a problem is when someone not directly affected starts championing it on behalf of some nebulous group that until then has said little on the subject.
For example: git master branch. We had a HUGE kerfuffle over that, to the point where even GitHub now gives git init examples that create and rename the master branch to "main". This was a pointless exercise that served no useful purpose other than to make a bunch of social justice warriors feel important.
Building special programs to lift people out of poverty is a good thing, especially for marginalized groups, but Affirmative Action was an abomination that only hurt those groups by reinforcing the stereotype that they're less capable.
Same goes for what DEI mutated into over time. The backlash we see today is because they went WAYYYYYYYY too far (because the politics of these things are always "keep pushing"), and so now that it's swinging the otherway, we're going to throw the baby out with the bath water. Everyone loses.
> When you observe someone publicly doing something that they think is virtuous, why is your first assumption that they’re broadcasting it cynically, rather than that they’re simply being virtuous in a public setting? Most people don’t think that way.
Most people don't think that way CONSCIOUSLY, but people do crave status, and will subconsciously tweak their beliefs to put them on the virtuous side of whatever they're doing, even when bullying others to lift themselves up (dragon slaying). This behavior is as old as time, and must be fought against whenever it rears its ugly head.
Does changing my git branch naming practice harm me? No. Does it encourage me to be more thoughtful about how I use language in general, even if that particular case probably doesn’t really matter? Yes. I see that as an absolute win.
By the way, Git’s release notes explicitly mention a desire to “wean ourselves off of the hardcoded ‘master’”[0]. GitHub is just following the intended use of the tool that it wraps.
> people do crave status, and will subconsciously tweak their beliefs to put them on the virtuous side of whatever they're doing
Why is it bad that people try to be virtuous, and why do you think that wanting to be virtuous implies a desire for status?
[0] https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqq5za8hpir.fsf@gitster.c.googl...
The rude person often is the one policing others by taking a person's figure of speech and applying a moral judgement completely outside of the speaker's intended context. Offense is taken, not given.
If you want to maintain the moral high ground when you criticise people for policing others, don’t instruct people which emotions are valid or invalid for them to feel in response to your actions.
Memes will always circulate in and out of fashion. I don't think Ken is trying to kill the meme with his own hands (there are, at most, a few thousand hackers who will read this or care what he thinks) or worse, "signal virtue" (I can't imagine why he would care what anyone here thinks, and I'm sure he knows he would find disagreement here). I think what he's actually doing is delivering confirmation to a subset of readers---probably those who already had doubts---that the meme is dead, and it's time to move on. It's the same thing that happens when some faceless corporation's twitter account parrots some joke that used to be funny to make the brand more relatable or trustworthy, but instead it's a faceless hacker news account misusing an insightful term popularized by a great physicist in hopes of also appearing insightful.
I also don't think he is writing this for any "culture war" reason; I think the post may have been inspired by pure annoyance---see his 2013 post listing "cargo cult" and other phrases he's "tired of seeing." [1]
He doesn't call the phrase racist, or hateful, or offensive, or morally wrong. I didn't interpret the essay to be "policing language" or "catering to imaginary offences [...] on behalf of some supposedly marginalized people" or saying that "everyone should change their behaviour" or starting a "hyperstitious slur cascade." Melanesian history just happens to be where all the interesting information lies, and I thank him for collecting it. Thousands of words about the real reason for the post (lazy hacker news commenters) would be a total waste of bytes. Maybe people are interpreting a shirriff-style super-in-depth essay through the lens of "people only write this much when they're really angry"?
If you disagree with ken, maybe you think that the phrase refers to an important enough concept, or you like explaining the story, I think that's a reasonable stance to hold, and you should hold it without feeling so personally attacked you need to comment to fight back. I just think you might be clinging to a dead meme that's already used increasingly by people who like to seem smart by using an indirect term like "cargo cult" instead of "doing things superficially" or similar, and it's your choice whether you want to be lumped in with them.
That said, the article would have been a lot better without moralizing about harmful colonialism, or claiming that this metaphor is supposedly an insult.
The purpose of this metaphor was never to gain historical insights, or to teach a lesson about colonialism, or to judge the Polynesian natives from 80 years ago, it's to teach a lesson about modern practices of software development (or science I guess). It's a fable.
You can replace the Polynesians in the fable with anyone else, and the payload of the fable does not change. Because the payload of it has nothing to do with the Polynesians. I personally didn't remember that this metaphor was specifically about Polynesians and the war supplies. I remembered it being about some abstract tribes, possibly Africans and humanitarian aid supplies. Did someone explain it to me the wrong way, or was it me who assumed wrong from the fake photos? I dunno. It does not matter. I wasn't relying on this fable for anything other than a software development lesson. It was not a covert tool to justify colonialism, or to assert intellectual superiority over some historical tribes on the other side of the globe.
It's definitely good to know the historical truth – as I said, I genuinely do appreciate all the exposition in this article. But, if you package that together with the moralizing, it comes off as yet more culture war BS that I am so sick of.
The difference in motivation is very important. If you write with the primary goal to expose historical inaccuracies – that's great. Then I can trust you. But if you write with the primary goal to stop people from using offensive (in your view) metaphors, then the historical inaccuracies are just a convenient tool, a talking point, for you to achieve your real goal. Because if this metaphor was actually historically true, you would probably still find it offensive. And so if that's your goal, then I can't trust you to provide historical accuracy. I will suspect you of presenting selective evidence, and other tricks to further your goal. That is why your moralizing detracts from the article.
I didn't mix them up on purpose, and I won't pretend to be an expert on the taxonomy of the various Pacific Islander ethnicities.
Yes, the article does mention Melanesians by name. So what. It mentions other important things and people by name that I don't remember either. So what. Those exact names and identities are not important, neither to my point, nor to the point the article is making.
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.
I'm of the opinion that attempts to police language in cases like this, is at best a waste of time.
Sounds like we're 'cargo culting' the phrase 'cargo cult'.
Nevertheless, great read!
There's this idea that "everyone knows what is being talked about" when a term like cargo cult is used casually, and I don't think that's true for these little tech parables. Often, they're used rhetorically to try to win arguments by appealing to the authority of a piece of terminology being well known, in itself. The alternative is painstakingly constructing an argument bespoke to the actual details of the present circumstance.
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.
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).
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.
[0] https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/postmoder...
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.
Anthropologists who take "cargo cult" seriously have let themselves be trolled by pop culture.
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.
"Byzantine generals", anyone?
Have you thought about an alternative concept or word that describes this phenomenon that could be used instead?
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.
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."
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 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).
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):
const char *str = "hello\0"; // make sure it's null terminated
if (ptr != NULL) free(ptr); // don't free if not allocated
1 - Become as relevant as Mr Feynman
2 - Get invited to CalTech to give a commencement speech
3 - Share your personal opinions there.
In the age of digital soapboxes, everyone feels their opinions are relevant - and many people try to leverage virtue signaling to get audience appeal, as followership has become a metric for quality.
This feels the case. I think that if we look hard enough we could be offended by everything and anything. And I think the heightened sensibility to be offended these days correlates negatively with overall societal intelligence.
Intelligent people have flexible mindsets to discuss and hence not so open to sensibility. People who follow others people mantras, not so flexible and reject what they doesn’t fit in their views.
It might not have been at a commencement speech, but didn’t Feynman say, “Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look at what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, 'Is it reasonable?“. You are doing your hero a great disservice. Or perhaps you have a specific opinion on the article.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Similar examples: * The tragedy of the commons - this is an extremely useful parable to invoke a game-theoretic / social behaviour concept. However, it is apparently historically inaccurate - at small scales, societies were able to protect and look after common lands, because of other societal factors such as reputation; the actual loss of the commons came not from overuse by the unlanded but from people who already had their own land taking more and fencing it off. Nevertheless, in larger scale societies, the principle of over-exploitation of shared resources in the absence of a mechanism to prevent that is a real and valid concern, so the analogy has a lot of value. * The use of probably apocryphal fables like 'The boy who cried wolf' have immediate meaning when it comes to concepts like alarm fatigue. * Many religious analogies have persisted in societies that don't hold the original religious belief. 'Holy Grail', for example, as an analogy for a desirable outcome. * Concepts from popular fiction sometimes become analogies too. "Golden Path" for example.
Not every analogy makes sense in every circumstance, but they are useful as a mutually understood shorthand to convey concepts.
So even if I greatly respect this guy when he talks tech, in this case, sorry, no. Big no.
More specifically, checking the etymology, "ojalá" seems related to the (old?) Arab idiom "wa sha Allah" (transliterations differ), roughly meaning "and God willing", which matches an equivalent Spanish idiom. I can't see how this has ever been insulting at any point in history.
Honestly, I think your colleague is virtue signalling hard.
But here, you don't present any argument that your recommended course of action will have a desirable outcome, or any outcome at all.
Which, ironically, fits like a glove.
Fine, I get it, the term has been over-used and has consequently become meaningless. Orwell noted the over-use of "fascist", in 1944! Feel free not to use it. But surely you are not expecting some kind of outcome?!
The term "cargo cult programming" (or cargo cult security, or cargo cult science, etc.) is a useful term and if you hope to get people to stop using "cargo cult" you need to suggest something else that works at least just as well. Perhaps "ritualistic programming"?
Why be so obsessed with what things meant originally? Why not let things exist without patterning them to the past in grotesque ways that no one is doing? Language evolves, it isn't restricted to its roots.
Who, other than the obsessed, are being harmed by people using this language? Why do you care so much? What is the goal of the crusade to align historical interpretation with present usage? Is it because it is easy to win battles against ghosts?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce
edit: typo
These are not oppositional, dead code that does nothing doesn't make the planes land.
> Feyman's cargo-cult science has no chance of working, while cargo-cult programming works but isn't understood.
I disagree with this conclusion. Cargo cult programming is (for example) creating a microservices product without understanding and then when it doesn't work (it takes 20x longer, it didn't provide the promised decoupling) not understanding why. Cargo cult programming where the desired results are actually achieved in any meaningful way isn't cargo cult programming at all.
> The second problem with "cargo cult" is that the pop-culture description of cargo cults is historically inaccurate.
It's a language construct. It's not really important whether there is any connection at all to anything that has historically happened, so long as everyone has the same mental model of what it means. And as far as I'm aware, enough people do to make the term useful. Whether it's scientific nonsense isn't relevant. The same can be said for a lot of commonly used phrases like "Jedi mind tricks". It doesn't matter that this is a purely fictional construct. And it doesn't matter whether diehard Star Wars fans know exactly what it means. Most people have a vague understanding about in what sense it's used. The de facto usage is the real meaning.
> Finally, the cargo cult metaphor turns decades of harmful colonialism into a humorous anecdote.
I think this is the only objection that has any real merit. But I don't think it has enough merit tbh. It doesn't represent a current problem.
Give me a better term to use.
The problem is that it accurately and concisely describes a pattern of behavior that I see all the time, where people at businesses don't do the hard work to understand what they're doing, and they just copy methods around, unknowingly increasing the amount of technical debt in the company.
So it seems criticizing someone for cargo-culting should be a criticism of false metaphysical understanding of the world, rather than a false instrumental understanding of it.
That said, maybe the analogy could actually be stretched, but that would paint a rather different picture, with deeper implications. Like maybe there is a cult of the tech entrepreneur, with a certain teleology of utopia being brought with AI or something, with people cargo-cutting this by popping up chatgpt wrappers to summon the innovation and bring upon themselves mass wealth.
So like, the resolution to the cargo cult wouldn't be to teach them how to actually build airplanes, but rather to first dismantle their religious hierarchies, "correct" their religious beliefs, forbid or prevent their institutions of knowledge transfer replacing them with modern schooling, forcefully replace their epistemology with a "modern" epistemology, possibly using violence, promote certain ideals and social norms, etc. It seems to me that then and only then, with the epistemological groundwork, can the actual planes and runways be built correctly.
Also most of the time people call out "cargo culting" it's in defense of a system that is genuinely, needlessly obtuse, and amount to little more than "you're holding it wrong" complaints.
The author has a great point that “cargo cult” is used to describe anything in tech that someone doesn’t like. You could even say there is a cargo cult of calling things a cargo cult...
As you may see, the pop-culture explanation of a cargo cult and the anthropological definition are completely different
What does the author think that "flag waving" and "marching" refer to?
Like most of the insane (oops thats a bad word too now) language policing its mostly done by yuppies who feel some sort of non-existent transitive oppression for people they have no connection with, had no connection with, and read some history blurb and decided to create a masterpiece of verbal diarrhea on the internet. Of which this blogpost is no exception.
It's yet another example of the virtue olympics and a great sign we have been without war, famine, economic collapse, or food crisis for far too long. We have no real struggles so instead we focus on policing language.
I'll keep using master/slave/male/female/blacklist/cargo cult/insane, thanks. There's a reason progressivism is no longer cool.
(1) the metaphor is not to something actually readily popularly recognizable (despite being an image from "pop culture"; its true it comes from pop culture portrayals, but it is not the case that it is to a phenomenon which, outside of familiarity with the metaphor, lots of people are currently familiar with), which is why the (inaccurate) basis of the metaphor typically needs to be explained two people who have never heard the metaphor before.
(2) while neither the term nor the reference is that recognizable, for those too whom the term is recognizable, the use in the metaphor will often refers to a different thing than they are familiar with, either because their knowledge comes from the real phenomenon described by the term, or because they are used to different metaphors to the same inaccurate image. It therefore is not an aid to understanding even where the term is familiar.
(3) It doesn't actually, the way metaphor can, provide a concise way to describe a concept which would otherwise require a complex explanation. It's an exclusionary term that, because it requires explanation, makes people feel like part of an in-group, but it doesn't do anything to facilitate communication. It describes a practice being done by habit without an understanding of reason, or, more concisely, by rote.
I am sorry but this guy is way off here. What is really kicking you to write something like that?
Cargo cult refers to an idea, that is very well present today. And it should be highlighted. Here is an example: Turkey went on an infrastructure binge in order to "level up" their country. This is because of cargo cult misunderstanding. You look at the West with all these bridges, metros and skyscrapers and you think that's what made them powerful without realizing it is the other way around. The local elites were not fully corrupt but they engaged in a complex cargo cult.
Cargo cult has nothing to do with Christianity, the White, or the Melanesian people. It is a misunderstanding of the processes taking place because the people don't have the information required to build the models of what is taking place (ie: a plane).
The Melanesian people should get props for trying to compete and level their people up. The concept should be upheld as a cautionary tale of how this is not enough.
> The people of the Yaohnanen and Takel area had seen the respect accorded to Queen Elizabeth II by the colonial officials and concluded that her husband, Prince Philip, must be the son referred to in their legends.
This sort of evidence-free leaping needs its own metaphor.
But it reinforced my use of the term.
We see it all the time in technology. Something will solve everything....
The current AI bubble?
Your point is well taken: the idea of a cargo cult as described by Feynman never happened quite that way, and likely came from a work of fiction.
But that doesn't take away from the idea of a mechanically correct reproduction of a system that lacks the essential elements.
And I don't see that idea as being colonial or hateful; it's just an idea that relates to two cultures that are not understood by one another.
So thank you for the important point of correction; I learned something from your essay. But I will still understand the term when I hear it, and I will not censor others from using it, or correct them if they choose to do so.
The richness of language is a cultural value, just like tolerance. In this case, I think we can have both.
1. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-...
It amazed me a few years ago now to observe The Guardian in the UK running an article ruminating on whether the term BAME (an acronym for "Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic"), a term which itself had only just about escaped the halls of academia and left-wing journalism, was no longer fit for purpose and should be denied and now considered racist. The dragon was eating its own tail in real-time on that one.
I also didn't know about the ties of Christianity with cargo-cultism lol.
> Note that the metaphor in cargo-cult programming is the opposite of the metaphor in cargo-cult science: Feynman's cargo-cult science has no chance of working, while cargo-cult programming works but isn't understood.
Is it used like that? I guess sometimes - I've also heard it used in the former, that there's software engineers that will adopt a practice in the hopes that it works, but even when it inevitably fails, they keep worshipping the practices by tackling it with the same tools and approaches (mainly in the context of OOP). Not agreeing with it just saying my observation
If you want to replace the expression "cargo culting", come up with a better succinct phrase that is as targeted to the modern phenomena it is used to refer to, and is as memorable.
(Good luck reaching Feynman levels of wit & charisma.)
Snake oil medicine.
Silicon snake oil!
First, you can call it out as wrong. But I have never seen such "enlightenment campaigns" succeed. Nobody likes smartasses that write "accctttuuuaaalllyy" articles.
Second, "cargo cult" is a useful term even if not rooted in reality. That's also why it spread and persists. It fills a void that, for whatever reason, "bandwagon effect" never filled.
Third, speak for yourself. The zeitgeist moved on from moralistic language lecturing. The more you associate it with virtue signaling, the less will people adopt it nowadays.
I have met Ken (around the time that YC received an original Xerox Alto and he was one of the experts who got it working again). Ken may be the least smartass person I have ever met.
I think you (and of course I don't just mean you, but anyone commenting here) should be more careful about publicly labeling other human beings.
I, for one, think that is pretty clear from the fact that I don't call the author by their first name. I did not write "Ken you're a smartass." Also, I did not write on his LinkedIn profile, I commented on a specific article.
In any case, it is but one of many comments and by up-/down voting, the community can send a signal to the author (if he reads here) as to whether he appears to be a smartass in this article. I think that is helpful.
For instance my father-in-law was in fascist (no kidding!) Italy which got attacked by fascist (Nazis!) Germany and had their farm ruined, their wine barrels spilled. Many members of his family wound up in Binghamton NY where their social networks channeled them into certain occupations. (Splits pretty well based on unionized/self-employed and across gender: construction, Italian restaurants, K12 education, hairdressers; my French Canadian and Polish relatives in New England seem to all be in law enforcement or some other kind of "first response", even the girls, except for the pro hockey player who now coaches college hockey and lives with his husband; if any of them tried to break into teaching at college, newspaper reporting, or things that other ethnic groups specialize in, they'd discover the same baffling barriers that black people would encounter)
A friend of my son has mental health problems I can't DX (e.g. "pathological narcissism" is a sign, i see "body dysmorphia" is a symptom even if it is a DX in the DSM) but his mom who grew up in rural China (educated, got a medical certificate which doesn't let her practice here, thinks it was a mistake because she knows many people who got really rich thanks to economic expansion back home and is seriously committed to an evangelical church that should teach her better) believes the DX is "possessed by demons" which was a culturally universal and common DX almost everywhere throughout almost all of human history and prehistory.
I worked for a startup where there were two Indians (a Reddy and a Juggernaut, Hindus will get a clear understanding of their social position based on that) who grew up in a village about 30 miles from Bangalore, got educated in that city, got more education here, and wound up working together where they stuck up for each other like blood brothers. Like many Indians I've met working in the industry, the younger struggled in the US, not least with the immigration authorities, and I tried really hard to communicate my sympathy, admiration and respect but failed as so I often have with Indians in his position.
Various "BiPOC" histories are equally valid yet basically the same story (farm to city via severe trauma) if you separate them from the label which erases the reality: e.g. still on the farm in Africa, got torn away against their will, deliberate destruction of their culture in the past, present (and future so long as the idea that "the holocaust should never happen again" displaces the reality that genocide happens over and over again,) etc which is general but can't really be understood without the personal specifics.
"Cargo cult", "BiPOC" and many other terms ought to get phased out and replaced by better and more detailed stories.
If she really believes someone is possessed by demons, I'd say it's a good thing that her "medical certificate" doesn't let her practice there.
Folk religion includes other practices which are illegal under the Communist regime and were also illegal under Chiang Kai-Shek.
In Hubei province, for instance, a family with a troubled child might seek help from a "fox medium" who might attempt to divine the problem by inspecting the ashes from burnt incense and then, if that fails, be possessed by a fox spirit who will tell the people involved how it's going to be. If people don't play along they may be "haunted" for months which could partially be a matter of laying down a strong memory but is also not a difficult feat to accomplish in a culture where there are small and large fox shrines everywhere and everybody gets a fox figurine when they are born (which you will put on an altar together with your partner's when you get married.) Arraigning scenes in a small village isn't that hard, particularly if the fox has a network of confederates who owe the fox a favor or are otherwise in its power.
C's mom may very well have seen these practices be successful herself and almost certainly knew people who knew people who had been helped.
That was psychiatry for most of human existence, I mean we've had Freud for 120 years, decent psych drugs for 60. Similar practices have been documented in Africa, Polynesia, the Americas, etc. Here people get multiple psychiatric hospitalizations but never a real DX or RX. Here I saw pamphlet funded by a pharmaceutical company that made it sound as if, with his prescription pad, a doctor transforms Ritalin from a dangerous addictive drug to a safe ADHD treatment just like the priest at the Catholic church transforms bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
From a cross-cultural perspective our practices are a fad like everybody having gluten intolerance or autism and those practices are time tested. If I tried to do the same thing in modern North America, however, I'd have a much harder time.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/kang13338 [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262829300_Persuasio... [3] https://www.amazon.com/Uncommon-Therapy-Psychiatric-Techniqu...
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.
At the time, I was unaware of this term, and the explanation given to me was the "misunderstood" one, as explained in the article.
Since that incident, I, too, have pointed out patterns of "cargo culting" as/when I identified them. Not too many, but definitely more than a couple. More than once, I've repeated the same explanation. I've even used the "misunderstood" explanation as a fun anecdote to share at gatherings (both work, and social).
While I don't think less of the original person for referring to my team as a cargo cult (they were sincere in their criticism), the article will definitely stop me from using the misunderstood version of events as the "true" origin of the term. It will change the way I speak about it, even if I refer to this term in the future.
For that, I am grateful.
It's correct to be anti-racist / anti-sexist / etc. but that doesn't come from just changing your language while still operating the same as before. It reminds me of the whole fuss over using "homeless" vs "unhoused" - while actual policies to help homeless people get ignored or defunded.
Clarified at the end of the post, i think a valid complaint is that the fictitious pop culture version (from which the technical use was derived) has unfortunately obscured the anthropologically correct version which is far darker and important.
> Finally, the cargo cult metaphor turns decades of harmful colonialism into a humorous anecdote. Feynman's description of cargo cults strips out the moral complexity: US soldiers show up with their cargo and planes, the indigenous residents amusingly misunderstand the situation, and everyone carries on. However, cargo cults really were a response to decades of colonial mistreatment, exploitation, and cultural destruction. Moreover, cargo cults were often harmful: expecting a bounty of cargo, villagers would throw away their money, kill their pigs, and stop tending their crops, resulting in famine. The pop-culture cargo cult erases the decades of colonial oppression, along with the cultural upheaval and deaths from World War II. Melanesians deserve to be more than the punch line in a cargo cult story.
I don't think it's possible to override the pop culture version, language does its own thing, but the author at least managed to inject a bit of important history back into it for many of us here, and that will probably make an interesting talking point as we are reminded of it each time we use it technically.
All the responses pushing back against this idiocy in this thread give me hope for the future, that we're regaining our collective sanity.
Critizize China, russia or isis and you might end up like those who actually fought in the resistance or some menshiwiki. Not recommended how that ended.
My native language is Ewe. The words we usually use for caucasian people is "yo vo".It's an evolution of an archaic pronunciation used today by only a few, "ye vu", and it was brought to my attention recently that it means "cunning dog".Ye=cunning, Vu=dog.
Explanation: we kinda didn't start on a good footing with the Germans back in the day ... So today most people will call every white person "cunning dog" without even knowing or meaning harm because the dialect has evolved. On one hand, for most people, it's just a random word with no insulting connotation; you try to make them switch to some another term, you're crazy dumb woke etc. On the other hand, I know I would take offense in being called that even if I'm told the word's lost the original meaning a long time ago.
Personally I don't know where the middle ground should be. But some "retroactive policing of language" is definitely needed. It may seem mundane to you, but sometimes these kind of things can be unsavory to other people. With globalization, it's not you and your pals anymore ...
Intent doesn't really matter here; it's just poor communication if you are aware of where the term comes from. Why not just use "dogmatic" or something?
I mean, yes, there is probably a more pressing cause, a worthier cause, a more effective way to bring about change if the guy cares about the issue of colonialism or something. So what? There's always a worthier or more pressing cause or arguably a better way to pursue it than [x].
If you care about something, that's your cause. You don't need to justify it by establishing that your commitment to it accurately reflects its place in the triaged hierarchy of capital-i issues.
It's also possible to care about more than one thing at a time.
So if this is the guy's cause, that's fine. He doesn't need to devote himself to something worthier or demonstrate that the energy he expends on it is well spent.
That being said, his criticism of the metaphor and his prescription both strike me as not just nonsense but backwards. Providing historical context shows, if anything, that "cargo cult" as a metaphor is historically accurate, especially in the sense in which engineers use it: cargo cult engineering practices are those that their believers are convinced will help usher in some desired future, but the basis of those practices is sheer superstition.
And the fact that there is a story, in the context of actual, historical cargo cults, to be told about exploitation or subjugation is, again, an irrelevant, empty truism. Almost every grass-roots religious movement can be interpreted this way. And in areas that were under colonial or authoritarian rule, one would be hard pressed to find social and religious movements that don't in one way or another respond to those conditions.
So the author's historical analysis is sophomoric, like the guy has just discovered oppression and really wants to raise the alarm about it. The resulting prescription is empty, lame, and tedious.
Sanctifying the oppressed this way is also weirdly tone deaf and condescending. Nobody's asking us to protect the subaltern religious movements of southeast Asia, nobody's belittling them, and nobody cares, except the author, apparently, who for some strange reason is filing complaints on their behalf.
It’s ironic that the author themselves is cargo culting taking back language as an apologetic virtue signal.
“Don't you see that the whole aim of cancel culture is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it”
I'm sure there are 1000000 other things you could devote your time to than policing someone's blog-post language on HN.
My rule of thumb is that anyone who talks about decolonization is a grifter. The specific harms of colonialism are real; decolonial thinking is for those without anything worthwhile to say.
"We should avoid criticizing people's speech."
Note that both of these statements are criticisms of people's speech.
It's gonna be OKAY. It's OKAY to subtly adjust your language towards better ends, if it makes people feel more comfortable and creates a more equitable environment around you. The world won't implode. Although truly strained to the core of my being I have found the willpower to stop using "chinese whispers", preferring "game of telephone", stopped using "guys", preferring "y'all" and started to prefer generic "they/them" until I know the person's pronouns.
Amongst all the slings and arrows of life suffered, let this tiny ask be not one of them.
This is still, by the way, how it's seen by many "educated" and "well meaning" people who would talk about appropriation if it came in other context.
So, I guess my question is, when will you stop using y'all, as it makes me feel uncomfortable?
Who is being made to feel more comfortable? I think what's missing here is any evidence of harm or even minor discomfort.
It's not OK to demand I take on the cognitive load of changing my speech for no particular reason, or to shame me for not taking it on.
I don’t think that the post really supports that idea at all. It was incomplete, perhaps, but does not sound inaccurate.