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Comment by gwd | Hacker News Reader

> The cargo cult story, as it goes, simply describes the (in many ways fascinating) behavior of humans when faced with phenomena they are unable to understand

How can it teach us anything about human psychology if it never actually happened?

> It is not defamation to infer that a primitive group of people is, well, primitive.

Primitive doesn't mean stupid. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel", Jared Diamond said that nearly all the tribal peoples he met when doing fieldwork were seemed to be, on average, more intelligent, engaged, curious, and knowledgable than the average Westerner. (In his follow-up book, "The World Until Yesterday", he attempts to capture some potential wisdom that tribal peoples have that he thinks modern society may have lost.)

It's this confusion between "primitive" and "stupid" that is exactly the harm that he cargo cult story creates and perpetuates.

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Which is why I used the word primitive, and not the word stupid. If you are making this confusion, that is on you. The "cargo cult" terminology does not imply stupidity. It implies, at most, ignorance.

Also, the tale may be apocryphal, but apocryphal tales (such as fairy tales) still can contain interesting insights about how humans behave. Maybe that's why they propagate through time.

> Also, the tale may be apocryphal, but apocryphal tales (such as fairy tales) still can contain interesting insights about how humans behave. Maybe that's why they propagate through time.

But do you make it clear to those you tell the cargo cult story that it is supposed to be apocryphal?

Otherwise I can spread all kinds of made-up stories about my work mates, and claim they illustrate truths about human nature, right?

> Otherwise I can spread all kinds of made-up stories about my work mates, and claim they illustrate truths about human nature, right?

Yes, you actually can do this, and if those stories do reflect actual human nature that other people also observe then they will be shared and spread. If they warn of potential problems that really do sometimes happen and allow other people to avoid those problems then they will be useful, even if they were made up!

So I can claim you once deleted the master database (although you never did), and use that to warn juniors who join to be careful?

I guess we have quite different opinions on slander and defamation.

Yes, I would say you have a very different opinion on slander and defamation from me and also from all of the western legal tradition.

You're going to have a bad time when you learn just how much of fiction is loosely based on / exaggerations / distortions of people and events that the author knew or experienced.

And, yes, if it helps, you have my permission to tell your junior engineers how ol' imgabe, in his hubris, once deleted the master database and was chained to a rock by the gods to have his liver pecked out by eagles for all eternity.

> Yes, I would say you have a very different opinion on slander and defamation from me and also from all of the western legal tradition.

I think you're misunderstanding what the GP was talking about.

If we worked together at a company, and I went to a bunch of junior new hires and said (falsely), "hey, let me tell you about the time imgabe deleted the production database, causing a week-long outage that lost us 20 of our customers", that would absolutely be defamation. That could even be legally actionable if you could prove that story was causing you harm (like perhaps clueless management heard and believed the story, and you were then passed up for promotion or a raise). Not saying that it would be easy to do so, but I personally think you'd be justified in being upset that someone made up a story like that about you. I have a reasonably thick skin, but I certainly wouldn't be pleased that a made-up story like that about me was circulating about me.

And even if you seriously wouldn't care about someone making up a story like that about you and using it as an object lesson at your workplace, assuming that no one would ever be offended or upset about that is... well, kinda shitty.

That is a tortured interpretation of what is happening here, though. Cargo cults did happen. And some of them did in fact operate in the way explained in the stories.

The point of the story is not to gloat and say "hahaha these stupid islanders are so dumb and we're so smart". The point is to illustrate a particular type of error and to make people aware that we, too, can make that very same error. That we are not, in fact, better and smarter, but rather the same and just as susceptible to the same errors.

The reason we use the story with the cargo cults is because the error is much easier to see from the other side, where you understand how the system actually works and you know why the things the islanders are doing won't actually result in any planes arriving. The point is that sometimes you are on the side the islanders are on where you are not understanding how the system works and you need to recognize that and work on understanding it and not just mindlessly imitating something.

This is obvious to anyone who is not walking around desperately searching for something to feel offended about.

Aren't we supposed to call it the main database these days?

(Sorry for bringing that side branch of the discussion into this one)

> Otherwise I can spread all kinds of made-up stories about my work mates, and claim they illustrate truths about human nature, right?

This happens all the time, and it’s fine? A recent front page example [0] — did julius ever exist? Who knows. Would it change anything? Not really…

A problem could definitely arise if you specifically called out a coworker without anonymization, but speaking in broad strokes is… perfectly fine and uneventful

[0] https://ploum.net/2024-12-23-julius-en.html

I don't think that example illustrates what the GP was arguing against. Julius is presumably not a real person, but is an amalgamation of behaviors made by real people. The author of that post may not have even ever known anyone names "Julius".

GP was talking about intentionally making up stories about real people, using their real names, and telling those stories to others who might actually even know the person in the false stories.

But that’s not really descriptive of anything discussed, is it? The cargo cult story names no names, and talks about a general group (south sea islanders). Calling out a specific individual raises a swath of other issues, but even that’s fairly commonly done with little issue for famous people… and it’s fine — especially when they’re famous & dead

> How can it teach us anything about human psychology if it never actually happened?

How can the fable of the tortoise and the hare teach us anything if a tortoise never actually raced a hare?

This is a disingenuous reply. If you tell a story about a human group, and base your ideas of how humans behave based on that, it better be true. Otherwise we can base policy on all kinds of exotic stories that never happened.

It did happen for one thing, and for another such stories, even when fictitious, are crafted to illuminate a human behavior that does happen, even if that particular story did not literally happen. See, for example, all of literature.

OK, point taken; we tell the Emperor's New Clothes even though it never happened.

On the other hand, nobody thinks it actually did happen: it's understood to be ridiculously exaggerated to make a point. And there's not a specific named group of people who are implied to have actually been gullible enough to fall for the trick.

I find the actual cargo cult beliefs -- "our ancestors are sending us loads of cargo which the white people are stealing from us" -- in a way far more disturbing in a "teach us something about human psychology" way. Compare to, "There is loads of prosperity available, which {the government, the capitalists, immigrants} are stealing from us."

There are plenty of similar stories about real people though, that aren't true, but we tell them to make a point anyway.

I'm sure there's lots of people who believe Einstein flunked grade school math even though he didn't. The point is more important though - flunking grade school math is not the end of the world and you can still be successful in life. Einstein's reputation is relatively unharmed by this fabrication.

I still think it's important that people understand what actually happens.

FWIW, as a reasonably clever person (a paper I wrote in the course of my PhD got an ACM Hall of Fame award) who regularly got failing grades until I got into high school, I think that story about Einstein, if I heard it, only did me harm. I started putting in effort in high school sort of on accident. I wish someone would have kicked me in the ass much sooner, told me that nobody cares how smart you are if you don't get the job done, and that I'd better figure out how to make things happen or I'd be a wanna-be loser.

OTOH, it's said that people with dyslexia or other neurodivergences which cause them to struggle in school often make good entrepreneurs -- they're used to dealing with failure and used to working around their limitations to get things done.

Details matter.

Indeed, that's the point I was making earlier. It's one thing to tell an apocryphal story to illustrate something we already know to be true, and another to base our "truths" on made up stories.

That fable is crystal clear on being made up story. It also does not teach about human nature at all.

Do humans ever get overconfident and slack off and lose to opponents who work more diligently? Why, yes, humans do do that and that’s what the story is about.

I think maybe you don’t understand fables, or possibly stories in general.

>> "...it never actually happened?"

The premise of the article is not at all that cargo cults never happened. Instead, the article acknowledges that cargo cults happened, but claims they are misunderstood and often ill-documented, and therefore unsuitable for software metaphors.

The "never happened" claim is waaaay stronger and likely no credible or serious observer would make the "never happened" claim.

So what? If the argument is "ok, cargo cults did happen, but the reality of them has nothing to do with how we use 'cargo cult' as a poor software development metaphor, but we're still going to use it that way anyway"... that... seems worse, actually?

I think it's kinda shitty to make up a pejorative story about a group of people to describe a bad practice. But it seems really dumb to take a real story about that group of people, and then completely misinterpret it (intentionally or otherwise) and use it in a way that makes no sense.

It's no more pejorative than "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Tangentially, Yali, the New Guinea politician whose question set Diamond on the path to writing Guns, Germs, and Steel, was involved in cargo cultism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yali_(politician)

> How can it teach us anything about human psychology if it never actually happened?

I am sympathetic to this argument as I despise Lord of the Flies and always believed it was unrealistic, and was gratified recently to find that a similar real-life situation did occur and it did not turn out like the book at all.

However, in this case it did happen and that fact is seemingly not in dispute, as the article here uncritically quotes several sources describing cargo cult behavior matching Feynman's story almost exactly (Time Magazine and National Geographic). The main argument of this article seems to be that while there have been a couple of cases like this, there is a larger category of cargo cults which generally have other features and more complexity, though they are no less deluded overall. This argument falls flat for me. I don't see why this should be fatal to the metaphor.

The point is that the islanders were not mistaking effect for cause, but simply believing some wrong things.

For example, they were clearing the airstrips, not because they believed that doing so caused the cargo to appear, but simply to facilitate the delivery of the cargo if and when it came.

This is false. The quoted National Geographic article explicitly claims that they built airstrips and radio towers to attract cargo. Time Magazine, too, claims that they believed their rituals would cause the cargo to be delivered.

I'm not saying every cargo cult worked this way. I'm saying cargo cults that worked this way did exist according to the very sources quoted by the article, which it does not dispute.

> ...I despise Lord of the Flies and always believed it was unrealistic, and was gratified recently to find that a similar real-life situation did occur and it did not turn out like the book at all.

But that's stretching the meaning of the word "similar" rather far. Those were six guys in their upper teens; the book was about tens (over a hundred? Can't recall) boys around ten - twelve - lower-teens. Huuuge difference.

I’m entertained at the notion of Diamond’s book refuting an idea popularized by Feynman. I’m convinced that they both make shit up. Feynman’s book wasn’t written by Feynman, but by a guy who heard Feynman’s stories years before, and Diamond’s book Guns Germs and Steel references many “facts” with zero citations that on further inspection turn out to be unsupported. Bullshit artist vs bullshit artist, basically.

Yes, they are only held as credible because they are convenient political tools. There is no concern for truth, only to prop up an ideology.

> How can it teach us anything about human psychology if it never actually happened?

The same way fables and other fictional stories do. They contain an idea and communicate that idea to the listener. They deliberately pull away from the real world which is full of nuance and unnecessary details and present a story that contains the essence of the idea they're trying to convey to help make it clear.

Nobody believes that a goose that lays golden eggs exists, but they still get the idea that excessive greed can carry negative consequences from the fable. And they share that story as something they can refer to to express that notion. Feynman's story of the cargo cults is a fable just as well as Aesop's goose that laid the golden egg.

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