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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

You’re making the world worse, not better. First, you’re perpetuating the idea that anybody should be offended by anything like this. You’re never going to meet an actual Melanesian cargo culter, and nobody else should take offense to this phrase.

Second, you’re impairing your own ability to communicate with doers because most smart people know what the term “cargo cult” means from Feynman.

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> most smart people know what the term “cargo cult” means from Feynman

Unsure which group you’re in after making this generalization

Not smart people but probably mostly software and computer people in general (but if you equate software and computer people with smart people then the statement is true).

Apparently, Fundamental of Data Engineering book does refer to cargo-cult metaphor inside its content [1].

[1] Fundamentals of Data Engineering:

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/fundamentals-of-data/97...

Sure, people should be more thick-skinned.

But if I'm pulling out the 'cargo cult' metaphor, it's because I'm about to criticise someone for unquestioningly repeating things they've seen elsewhere, without understanding the details.

So if I repeat some nonsense urban legend as fact, in order to criticise them for taking nonsense urban legends as fact - that's going to make me look kinda dumb. Even if it is an urban legend I heard from a nobel prize winner - I can't criticise the mote in my brother's eye until I've removed the beam in my own eye.

I think the reason some people have problems here is that the term "cargo cult" is in the middle of transition from being merely a reference to a story (which you need to explain to someone half the time you utter the phrase), into being an independent phrase with its own established meaning - i.e. taking meaning from how it's used, instead of the original story.

(Now I wonder whether Tamarian language is really referencing stories, or referencing the popular understanding of those stories. Sokath, his eyes closed.)

Do you believe that language should remain unchanged, or that it should evolve only for reasons beyond conscious intention?

I’m not okay with evolving language intentionally out of a mistaken belief that minorities are so fragile that we need to change the way we talk.

Indeed.

https://scroll.in/article/1023979/from-outsiders-to-termites...

I would argue that such intentional changes to language isn't "evolution" at all. Sure, language evolves, but not by some kind of edict.

It's not evolution - more like language eugenics.

You clearly didn’t read the article. Feynman didn’t know what cargo cults were, he repeated misinformation from a movie that incorrectly dramatized real practice. And further, his “cargo cult science” definition doesn’t match the modern-day “cargo cult programming” definition.

The point is that the metaphor is not just oversimplified and misinformed, but means conflicting things and is overused to the point that is meaningless.

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