Nope, we’re not doing this in 2025. Cargo cult succinctly expresses an important concept. We’re not catering to imaginary offenses somebody hallucinates on behalf of some supposedly marginalized people anymore.
So first of all, I absolutely agree that it's an important concept: to me the idea is one of imitating externally observable behavior, patterns, what-not, without any understanding of what's going on underneath. Unlike what the author says, "cargo cult science" certainly can get some sorts of results; particularly when the desired results are actually things like "grant money".
> We’re not catering to imaginary offenses somebody hallucinates on behalf of some supposedly marginalized people anymore.
I'm still processing the information from the blog somewhat; but at the moment, for me, it doesn't come down so much to the idea that these people may be offended, but that it defames them. The story as told in popular culture gives people a skewed idea of what the cultists are like, and reinforces a skewed and arrogant idea about how much better / scientific / whatever the rest of us are. These skewed views hurt both us and the cultists.
It may be, like the "frog slowly boiling" myth, that it's the sort of thing you repeat even knowing that it's not something that actually happens.
Or maybe we need to come up with a different name for it -- although it's not as easy to come up with a picture that's as evocative as the pop culture version of the cargo cult.
This doesn’t matter. Nobody is talking about the actual cultists. It’s a metaphor to talk about how people right now, in our own society behave around certain topics. The story behind it is apocryphal.
This is precisely what GP is talking about. It is not defamation to infer that a primitive group of people is, well, primitive. You are imagining defamation on behalf of them.
The cargo cult story, as it goes, simply describes the (in many ways fascinating) behavior of humans when faced with phenomena they are unable to understand, and how they derive their own interpretations of what happened. Taking a humble approach, we may be in the same position when it comes to things we, from the height of our reason, do not understand as well.
Isn't that the main point of that cargo-cult metaphor as used today - a restatement of Arthur C Clarke's technology and magic remark and how we've let our own magic exceed our reason... that we're no longer at the "height" of reason at all?
There is quite a lot of things any person is unable to understand about our own word, and you can see how they handle those.
How can it teach us anything about human psychology if it never actually happened?
> It is not defamation to infer that a primitive group of people is, well, primitive.
Primitive doesn't mean stupid. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel", Jared Diamond said that nearly all the tribal peoples he met when doing fieldwork were seemed to be, on average, more intelligent, engaged, curious, and knowledgable than the average Westerner. (In his follow-up book, "The World Until Yesterday", he attempts to capture some potential wisdom that tribal peoples have that he thinks modern society may have lost.)
It's this confusion between "primitive" and "stupid" that is exactly the harm that he cargo cult story creates and perpetuates.
Also, the tale may be apocryphal, but apocryphal tales (such as fairy tales) still can contain interesting insights about how humans behave. Maybe that's why they propagate through time.
But do you make it clear to those you tell the cargo cult story that it is supposed to be apocryphal?
Otherwise I can spread all kinds of made-up stories about my work mates, and claim they illustrate truths about human nature, right?
Yes, you actually can do this, and if those stories do reflect actual human nature that other people also observe then they will be shared and spread. If they warn of potential problems that really do sometimes happen and allow other people to avoid those problems then they will be useful, even if they were made up!
I guess we have quite different opinions on slander and defamation.
You're going to have a bad time when you learn just how much of fiction is loosely based on / exaggerations / distortions of people and events that the author knew or experienced.
And, yes, if it helps, you have my permission to tell your junior engineers how ol' imgabe, in his hubris, once deleted the master database and was chained to a rock by the gods to have his liver pecked out by eagles for all eternity.
I think you're misunderstanding what the GP was talking about.
If we worked together at a company, and I went to a bunch of junior new hires and said (falsely), "hey, let me tell you about the time imgabe deleted the production database, causing a week-long outage that lost us 20 of our customers", that would absolutely be defamation. That could even be legally actionable if you could prove that story was causing you harm (like perhaps clueless management heard and believed the story, and you were then passed up for promotion or a raise). Not saying that it would be easy to do so, but I personally think you'd be justified in being upset that someone made up a story like that about you. I have a reasonably thick skin, but I certainly wouldn't be pleased that a made-up story like that about me was circulating about me.
And even if you seriously wouldn't care about someone making up a story like that about you and using it as an object lesson at your workplace, assuming that no one would ever be offended or upset about that is... well, kinda shitty.
The point of the story is not to gloat and say "hahaha these stupid islanders are so dumb and we're so smart". The point is to illustrate a particular type of error and to make people aware that we, too, can make that very same error. That we are not, in fact, better and smarter, but rather the same and just as susceptible to the same errors.
The reason we use the story with the cargo cults is because the error is much easier to see from the other side, where you understand how the system actually works and you know why the things the islanders are doing won't actually result in any planes arriving. The point is that sometimes you are on the side the islanders are on where you are not understanding how the system works and you need to recognize that and work on understanding it and not just mindlessly imitating something.
This is obvious to anyone who is not walking around desperately searching for something to feel offended about.
(Sorry for bringing that side branch of the discussion into this one)
This happens all the time, and it’s fine? A recent front page example [0] — did julius ever exist? Who knows. Would it change anything? Not really…
A problem could definitely arise if you specifically called out a coworker without anonymization, but speaking in broad strokes is… perfectly fine and uneventful
GP was talking about intentionally making up stories about real people, using their real names, and telling those stories to others who might actually even know the person in the false stories.
How can the fable of the tortoise and the hare teach us anything if a tortoise never actually raced a hare?
On the other hand, nobody thinks it actually did happen: it's understood to be ridiculously exaggerated to make a point. And there's not a specific named group of people who are implied to have actually been gullible enough to fall for the trick.
I find the actual cargo cult beliefs -- "our ancestors are sending us loads of cargo which the white people are stealing from us" -- in a way far more disturbing in a "teach us something about human psychology" way. Compare to, "There is loads of prosperity available, which {the government, the capitalists, immigrants} are stealing from us."
I'm sure there's lots of people who believe Einstein flunked grade school math even though he didn't. The point is more important though - flunking grade school math is not the end of the world and you can still be successful in life. Einstein's reputation is relatively unharmed by this fabrication.
FWIW, as a reasonably clever person (a paper I wrote in the course of my PhD got an ACM Hall of Fame award) who regularly got failing grades until I got into high school, I think that story about Einstein, if I heard it, only did me harm. I started putting in effort in high school sort of on accident. I wish someone would have kicked me in the ass much sooner, told me that nobody cares how smart you are if you don't get the job done, and that I'd better figure out how to make things happen or I'd be a wanna-be loser.
OTOH, it's said that people with dyslexia or other neurodivergences which cause them to struggle in school often make good entrepreneurs -- they're used to dealing with failure and used to working around their limitations to get things done.
Details matter.
I think maybe you don’t understand fables, or possibly stories in general.
I am sympathetic to this argument as I despise Lord of the Flies and always believed it was unrealistic, and was gratified recently to find that a similar real-life situation did occur and it did not turn out like the book at all.
However, in this case it did happen and that fact is seemingly not in dispute, as the article here uncritically quotes several sources describing cargo cult behavior matching Feynman's story almost exactly (Time Magazine and National Geographic). The main argument of this article seems to be that while there have been a couple of cases like this, there is a larger category of cargo cults which generally have other features and more complexity, though they are no less deluded overall. This argument falls flat for me. I don't see why this should be fatal to the metaphor.
For example, they were clearing the airstrips, not because they believed that doing so caused the cargo to appear, but simply to facilitate the delivery of the cargo if and when it came.
I'm not saying every cargo cult worked this way. I'm saying cargo cults that worked this way did exist according to the very sources quoted by the article, which it does not dispute.
But that's stretching the meaning of the word "similar" rather far. Those were six guys in their upper teens; the book was about tens (over a hundred? Can't recall) boys around ten - twelve - lower-teens. Huuuge difference.
The premise of the article is not at all that cargo cults never happened. Instead, the article acknowledges that cargo cults happened, but claims they are misunderstood and often ill-documented, and therefore unsuitable for software metaphors.
The "never happened" claim is waaaay stronger and likely no credible or serious observer would make the "never happened" claim.
I think it's kinda shitty to make up a pejorative story about a group of people to describe a bad practice. But it seems really dumb to take a real story about that group of people, and then completely misinterpret it (intentionally or otherwise) and use it in a way that makes no sense.
The same way fables and other fictional stories do. They contain an idea and communicate that idea to the listener. They deliberately pull away from the real world which is full of nuance and unnecessary details and present a story that contains the essence of the idea they're trying to convey to help make it clear.
Nobody believes that a goose that lays golden eggs exists, but they still get the idea that excessive greed can carry negative consequences from the fable. And they share that story as something they can refer to to express that notion. Feynman's story of the cargo cults is a fable just as well as Aesop's goose that laid the golden egg.
Also important, cargo cult mentality implies a inversion of cause and effect and a baseless and unsubstantiated assumption that correlated but irrelevant aspects are actually the root cause of a phenomenon. Such as building runways in the middle of nothing expecting that to be the trigger to have cargo dropped at your feet.
Perhaps not, but it is certainly defamation to ascribe specific pejorative acts to people when they never actually acted in that way.
> The cargo cult story, as it goes, simply describes the (in many ways fascinating) behavior of humans when faced with phenomena they are unable to understand, and how they derive their own interpretations of what happened.
I feel like we can do this in a way that doesn't create a false narrative about an entire group or class of people, no?
And regardless of that, how can a story describe human behavior if the story doesn't describe behavior that actually happened?
Except nothing in the cargo cult story is pejorative?
I mean, is it pejorative that ancient people worshipped the Sun as a God for bringing light and warmth to the world, not understanding what the Sun actually is? Religions were developed following that belief too.
I fail to see how it defames anything. Maybe the prejudice is in the eye of the observer in this case. Your disrespect for more primitive cultures makes you think their presumed behavior is detrimental to their intelligence.
> false narrative about an entire group or class of people, no?
First of all, it is not entirely clear that the story never happened. The accounts of cargo cults are disputed. I am simply giving it the benefit of doubt that the story may be apocryphal.
Second, the story does not paint a false narrative of anything. It just describes primitive cultures as primitive. Being primitive is not pejorative, it is merely descriptive. If you think it is pejorative, I suggest you spend some time reflecting on your prejudices.
> And regardless of that, how can a story describe human behavior if the story doesn't describe behavior that actually happened?
Have you ever read any fairy tale or old folktales? "The boy that called wolf"? "The emperor's new clothes"?
Perhaps you did not know, but those stories are fiction. Fictional stories can still contain allegories and insights on human behavior.
A weird notion, I know. The world is full of things like that.
Otherwise, then I guess we can stop studying psychology/sociology/anthropology/etc. and instead resort to making up stories all day to fill in what we do not know.
Give an example of a term we can use instead that is more accurate and useful, and you won't need a wall of words to try and fail to convince people to change.
...and the "Save" icon is still a floppy disk.
In my experience most software that still use an icon for saving these days are using an arrow pointing down to a horizontal line. This icon is usually similar or exactly the same as a download icon.
I think the core of the metaphor is still there, that a practice can pass into lore and performance, severed from their logic and context.
Here's Feynman's quote:
> So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land.
(note no mention of fake airplanes)
And here are historical instances from the actual article:
> They hacked airstrips in the rain forest, but no planes came.
...
> They created mock radio antennas of bamboo and rope to receive news of the millennium.
...
> The leader remains in communication with John Frum through a tall pole said to be a radio mast, and an unseen radio. (The "radio" consisted of an old woman with electrical wire wrapper around her waist, who would speak gibberish in a trance.)
That looks to me like cargo cult in the pop culture sense.
At some point the fake airplane illustrations were inaccurately tacked on, but if anything they give the cults too much credit because they depict high-quality replicas.
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.
If you work with people from a country where baseball is not popular you might find that the phrase "ballpark figure" doesn't mean anything to them. That doesn't mean we need a finger-wagging article about how nobody should ever say it.
Arguing that we should excuse them is absurd, especially when googling the phrase "cargo cult programming" immediately reveals the relevant information, all for a grand total of five seconds of effort.
It is both an expression and succinct, so long as you're willing to learn something new. Once you do, it can be used in the future for all similar circumstances.
Until some political weirdo recently went and defaced the wikipedia article on cargo cults, you could just google "cargo cult" and understand the analogy within 5 seconds.
“Boiler plate” is absolutely not the same, in that boiler plate is generally necessary and thus the correct thing to do, and there is no implication that one applies it without understanding.
Unless you already know what it means, 'nothing' conveys absolutely nothing.