The origin of the cargo cult metaphor
732 comments
·January 12, 2025Aurornis
exe34
cargo culting programming approaches don't just not work, they saddle with both all the costs of doing things in a certain way and having to still deliver the outputs somehow. e.g. hiding work until you know what needs doing before pretending to come up with the information during bikeshedding sessions.
Groxx
Yeah, that quote is very far off I think.
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.
---
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.
CRConrad
> 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.
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.
null
Izkata
Yep, "copy/paste programming" is a separate term for the version that works without being understood.
alfiedotwtf
Strawman? Please.. it’s Strawperson
jacobjjacob
I think the nuance they are advocating for is twofold.
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”.
GuB-42
The article would be so much better if it was called "The origin of the cargo cult metaphor" instead of the rage inducing "It's time to abandon the cargo cult metaphor".
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.
dang
Normally we probably would have changed the title in that way, and I feel like we failed kens, who is one of the best article-writers ever to have contributed content to Hacker News. He probably had no idea how his carefully researched and super-interesting work would snap to the grid of culturewar deathbattle. I'm certain that was not what he intended.
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.
archagon
I am continuously stunned by how thin-skinned people are these days. A sermon? Good Lord, it’s a bog standard call-to-action essay title of the kind you’d pen in English class. You don’t have to mentally append “(And You’re a Bad Person If You Don’t)” to the end of it.
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.
chambers
It's not that the skin is thin, but that the muscle is tired. Our muscle (or sense) of guilt has been overused and abused. Now it's prone to inflammation when we hear people who intentionally or unintentionally trigger it.
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.
Lerc
I this post has enabled me to put my finger on what makes me uncomfortable about articles like this.
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.
paroneayea
That's almost every article on HN, though. Don't use inheritance, don't use C, use Kubernetes, don't use Kubernetes, etc etc.
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?
userbinator
People are fed up with the constant identity-politics culture-war bait. Mainstream news is already full of that stuff. HN in general is far more interested in the technical articles of the author.
scarecrowbob
It's kind of fun because any comment can be stated in a an objectionable way, I think.
"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...
smolder
I thought the article was interesting and informative even though I won't recoil at use of the term. Getting upset at the authors opinion is just as useless as getting upset about the thing they complain about, but boy do these comments do the former.
null
rors
This seems to be a characteristic of many high functioning people, especially successful engineers. There is a "correct" way of living your life, conducting your business, using your text editor, etc. It's helpful in that it ensures consistency and focus. The downside is that people become desensitised to nuance.
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.
sehansen
Cargo cults are a specific kind of cult where the ceremonies come from imitating some other community. And complaints about cargo cult programming aren't only about people doing ineffective things, it's also about people seeing someone else doing something effectively but then not doing the work to understand why it's effective. It's a complaint about people being so close to being much more effective, but then snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Lendal
It's easy for people who get paid to think to overthink things. He's overthinking it.
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.
SllX
> Unfortunately it feels like we are heading to
> "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.
jrowen
Or, depending on who you conversed with at the forum...
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?
BlueTemplar
Well, it's one thing to do it for these silly and easy examples, but how about :
"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.
Lerc
>"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."
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.
BlueTemplar
Those are all great points, but it's not all that simple, because of the Paradox of Tolerance (Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), and others).
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.)
----
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".
talkingtab
Cargo cult is, to me a tag for a particular kind of action. Where someone does something without an understanding of the mechanism they are using. My best example is agile development. Many (most) people implement agile without really understanding what how it is supposed to work. This is common, and it is a real thing, and a real problem we have. We have. One could give this some other name. Perhaps recipe-ism. Where you follow a recipe instead of understanding the process. But, personally, cargo cult sort of captures the essence of the thing. I never saw it as about Feynman, colonialism, racism or such. It is just about human nature. To me.
Speaking of recipes, the article very much reminded me of internet recipes, the ones that try to cram in as many ads as possible. So the recipe is preceded by the writer's life history, the history of the recipe, whether the name of the product is politically correct and then (200 ads later) three lines of the stuff you were really looking for. And in the worst circumstances you find that the core thing was not really all that informative. Sigh.
CRConrad
Hmm, "Cargo cult Agile"...? Yeah, the way "Agile"[1] is too often practiced, the way that has made everyone under ~45 hate "Agile", with its focus on Scrum and meetings and tickets and the ceremonies of "Agile"... Focus on ceremonies; how much more cult-like can you get? Yup: Cargo cult Agile.
___
[1]: Agile is an adjective, not a noun.
talkingtab
Nice one! Ceremonies! I like that.
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.
CRConrad
> In lieu of that, maybe we should just get some kind of high priests to run the scrum meetings?
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.
KronisLV
I think that “cargo cult” in how it’s commonly used encapsulates a certain kind of behaviour pretty well. If it was to be moved away from, then I’d at least like a similarly concise alternative.
Though I will admit, especially as a non-native English speaker, that there have been cases where changes in the terminology used have actually made more sense than the prior alternatives.
For example allowlist/deny list feels more concise and simpler to understand than whitelist/blacklist.
Also, naming the main version control branch “main” is also really obvious and clear, at least a bit more so than “master”.
Though once you start talking about further historical context, you’re going to lose some people along the way, who have not once considered it with much attention. A bit like some who used .io domains had never really heard much about Chagos.
jandrewrogers
The problem with “denylist/allowlist” is that the semantics of “blacklist/whitelist” are broader in practice than what that can convey.
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.
jwkpiano1
I mean, if that’s true I imagine they also don’t have much to do with the colors “black” or “white” either, right? Language changes all the time. I think for most software folks, who aren’t dealing with set theory, allowlist and denylist work pretty well. That’s been my experience, anyway.
bad_user
I'm also a non-native English speaker.
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.
KronisLV
> Blacklist is a word that stands out, an interesting combination like other English words or phrases and I had no issues with learning it.
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).
bdangubic
[flagged]
imgabe
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.
gwd
> It succinctly expresses an important concept.
So first of all, I absolutely agree that it's an important concept: to me the idea is one of imitating externally observable behavior, patterns, what-not, without any understanding of what's going on underneath. Unlike what the author says, "cargo cult science" certainly can get some sorts of results; particularly when the desired results are actually things like "grant money".
> We’re not catering to imaginary offenses somebody hallucinates on behalf of some supposedly marginalized people anymore.
I'm still processing the information from the blog somewhat; but at the moment, for me, it doesn't come down so much to the idea that these people may be offended, but that it defames them. The story as told in popular culture gives people a skewed idea of what the cultists are like, and reinforces a skewed and arrogant idea about how much better / scientific / whatever the rest of us are. These skewed views hurt both us and the cultists.
It may be, like the "frog slowly boiling" myth, that it's the sort of thing you repeat even knowing that it's not something that actually happens.
Or maybe we need to come up with a different name for it -- although it's not as easy to come up with a picture that's as evocative as the pop culture version of the cargo cult.
surgical_fire
> The story as told in popular culture gives people a skewed idea of what the cultists are like, and reinforces a skewed and arrogant idea about how much better / scientific / whatever the rest of us are.
This is precisely what GP is talking about. It is not defamation to infer that a primitive group of people is, well, primitive. You are imagining defamation on behalf of them.
The cargo cult story, as it goes, simply describes the (in many ways fascinating) behavior of humans when faced with phenomena they are unable to understand, and how they derive their own interpretations of what happened. Taking a humble approach, we may be in the same position when it comes to things we, from the height of our reason, do not understand as well.
gwd
> 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.
nonrandomstring
> 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?
kelnos
> It is not defamation to infer that a primitive group of people is, well, primitive.
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?
motorest
> 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.
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.
imgabe
> it doesn't come down so much to the idea that these people may be offended, but that it defames them. The story as told in popular culture gives people a skewed idea of what the cultists are like
This doesn’t matter. Nobody is talking about the actual cultists. It’s a metaphor to talk about how people right now, in our own society behave around certain topics. The story behind it is apocryphal.
darkerside
It's far easier to say yes to something else than to say no to something that is working.
Give an example of a term we can use instead that is more accurate and useful, and you won't need a wall of words to try and fail to convince people to change.
s1artibartfast
I dont really get the defamation angle. It seems like the practices where still very strange and performative. They seem to argue that it was more frequently about radios and boats than airplanes. Is that that more offensive or hurtful?
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.
BoppreH
I don't understand where's the defamation.
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.
userbinator
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.
...and the "Save" icon is still a floppy disk.
prmoustache
Are there still modern software using the floppy disk icon for save? I can't recall any.
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.
null
rat87
Its not a floppy disk, its a save icon
adamrezich
Until very recently my wife thought it was a SIM card.
nfw2
"Defamation" is well-defined in the legal system, and anyone is able to seek the remedy of damages through the courts if they wish to.
okonomiyaki3000
Yes, this exactly. In fact, we need a new term to describe the type of "cult" that pushes this agenda (probably the goal is just to get impressions/retweets more than an actual agenda though).
Human languages are full of idioms that have origins that no longer relate at all to the way the terms are used. It doesn't make them wrong or less useful.
imgabe
The same people who will write a history phd dissertation about the obscure, problematic origins of some innocuous phrase will also tell you that you can't say "balls to the wall" because it's "sexually suggestive" and then stare blankly when you explain the phrase has nothing to do with genitalia.
moronrespector
[dead]
omnicognate
I'd say in 2025 understanding historical context and questioning passively acquired meme-knowledge are more important than ever.
Chance-Device
This is an excellently expressed comment.
rvz
Agreed.
Stand up and call out against how ridiculous this request is.
This is 2025.
archagon
Who is this “we” that you claim to speak for?
Given how high this article is ranked, plenty of people are evidently receptive to it. Sorry!
prmph
So you're uninterested in the fact that things just didn't happen the way the cargo-cult story says?
I mean, you can continue to use the cargo-cult term if you want; just tell an accurate story about the phenomenon that inspired it, that's all
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wiseowise
> here’s a story about cargo cult origin
And
> you should stop using it
Are different things.
deactivatedexp
[flagged]
zuminator
Personally, aside from whether I was persuaded to abandon the metaphor, I found the history fascinating and informative. I actually remember being taught the apparently incorrect version of the origin of cargo cults in an anthropology class, so this was useful to me.
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."
culi
It's a useful article regardless. Many a big headed HNer have waxed poetically about cargo cults and quite a few of them have even written articles further spreading the mythical version of the story. Hopefully this will at the very least lead to some backlash and a convenient article to point to anytime someone further spreads misinformation
ikesau
I appreciated this article. The irony of "cargo cult" being the misunderstood phrase that people here like to use is not lost on me.
It's good to interrogate the wallpaper of colonialism, to discover what's hiding behind our euphemisms and clichés.
The phrase "cargo cult" as I had come to understand it before reading this article, definitely centered the cult's naivete ("oh those silly cargo cultists, worshipping shipping containers!"
But reading this passage:
> Other natives believed that God lived in Heaven, which was in the clouds and reachable by ladder from Sydney, Australia. God, along with the ancestors, created cargo in Heaven—"tinned meat, bags of rice, steel tools, cotton cloth, tinned tobacco, and a machine for making electric light"—which would be flown from Sydney and delivered to the natives, who thus needed to clear an airstrip
clarifies that this "naivete" was cultivated, by settlers with ulterior motives.
Using the idiom uncritically elides this dynamic, laundering the practices of missionaries that I'm sure most people here would loathe to be on the receiving end of.
Knowing this enriches the analogy when using it to describe aws lambda or whatever people use it for ("Who is producing the cargo? What are their motives? Why does one group have power over another?") but I think, in general, it would be good for people to find additional ways of talking about dynamics where people are making choices out of ignorance.
Because even if you don't agree with my social justice bent, I think Orwell was on the right track to say "never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."
Procrastes
I'm someone who used to use this phrase frequently after reading Feynman, but stopped long ago after realizing how lazy the story was. It became a popular phrase with the same crowd it most closely described. That's about the time people started saying things like "drink the Koolaid" in a positive sense. I guess the real revelation is that Orwell was the prophet of our own little apocalypse.
fargle
> That's about the time people started saying things like "drink the Koolaid" in a positive sense
wait, when was this? is there a linkable example? (i don't doubt you, but that's pretty bad)
jhbadger
Of course, someone could argue (analogously to this article) that the problem with the phrase is that the members of the People's Temple in Jonestown didn't drink poisoned Kool-Aid as often thought, but rather a different product called Flavor-Aid.
RustyRussell
When I was working for a large US tech company, one of colleagues used that term to their American managers in a positive way (we were Linux people, after all): turned out he didn't know the origin. Significant faux pas!
ACow_Adonis
Wait wait wait... You're either misinterpreting the article or reading extra implications into it.
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.
ikesau
Hey thanks, you make a good point - I was too hasty in proclaiming the connection between christian designs and the practices of the tribespeople (especially because if this article makes one thing clear, it's that the events and practices of these islanders shouldn't be haphazardly generalized, given how varied they were.)
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.
himinlomax
> It's good to interrogate the wallpaper of colonialism
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.
ikesau
okay, but I really wasn't trying to imply that the good-bad moral line of WW2 should be rotated. It's about adding nuance: the effects of european colonialism in the pacific are massive, intertwined throughout society in ways that are more and less invisible to us, and that it's edifying to understand that.
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.
sobellian
I remember reading the cargo cult story and thinking "ironically, I don't even know how accurate any of this is." Well, this article actually convinced me that the pop-sci description is fundamentally accurate.
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!
culi
Did we read the same article?
> 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?
sobellian
My parent post is notably not about the context that drove the cultists to adopt their practice. Even so. The pop-sci definition, directly quoted:
> 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.
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stonemetal12
Just because they had cargo cults before WW2 doesn't make the WW2 cargo cults any less cargo culty.
>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.
lolinder
Did you read the rest of the article or just the first few paragraphs? The rest of it straight up describes the exact practices recounted in Feynman's telling of the story, including "a cult of people who think of these cargo as magical gifts" as you call it.
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.
jmull
> That is perfectly described as imitating the outward appearance of methods one doesn't truly understand.
A person could perfectly well understand how radios work, while still constructing bamboo ones to receive messages from spirits.
sobellian
This is pretty generous, and while I'd like to believe it I don't think such a belief can be justified. The article, which is one of the best surveys on the matter I can find, doesn't really address whether the cargo cults understood modern technology. The furthest it goes is to state that for them, ritual was a kind of technology meant to achieve practical effects. We can say at the very least that the cargo cults did not understand how their rituals could achieve anything substantial.
jrowen
I agreed. Based on some of the early comments I went in expecting the article to be a little more purely "woke" but I found it to be well-written and well-researched, and it does make some interesting points.
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.
1shooner
Making the transition from anthropology to tech, the use of 'cargo cult' in tech really made no sense to me. So at best it's an idiom with wildly different meaning depending on context.
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.
adamrezich
> 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
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.
collingreen
> 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
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.
architango
Similarly, I’ve had to privately advise coworkers not to use the term “let a thousand flowers bloom” as an idiom meaning “let’s get ideas from lots of people.” It sounds great until you understand the horrible historical context in which it was originally said.
someothherguyy
I think things like this are a type of resource exhaustion attack on society. No one can be aware of all things potentially offensive to someone else. Its the hyperaware judges excluding mens rea from the equation before deciding guilt. What is the harm done to someone who might find this offensive? Why spend your time lifting the veil and shaming those around you who have no intention of harming anyone with their language? If they happen to offend a party some day, I am sure they will adjust their vocabulary accordingly. Why the haste to preempt this rare event?
architango
Because a number of people on our team were born and raised in China. It’s very likely that some of them had family affected by the awful aftermath of the Hundred Flowers campaign.
saulpw
I had a manager once who said "work makes you free".
DowsingSpoon
Huh. What do you mean? Why should the phrase not be used?
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.
spacechild1
Your usage is the correct one. Parent referred to people who mistakenly use the phrase in a positive sense.
layer8
I disagree. The usage has detached from the historical context of the original (mis)quote, and there’s no good reason for it to be eternally enslaved by it. This is also reflected in entries like [0] and [1]. Indeed, the Wiktionary entry notes that it may “be used ironically, in negative view” of the Hundred Flower Campaign, which in turn means that by default that context isn’t implied, and instead as a proverb it merely has the meaning described above in the entry.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/let_a_thousand_flowers_bloom#...
[1] https://playjustsaying.com/idiom/let-a-thousand-flowers-bloo...
architango
I don’t think it would be acceptable to say “Arbeiten macht frei” in a casual conversation. Just because Chinese history is distant from and unfamiliar to western experience doesn’t mean we should trivialize it.
engineer_22
Best to just forget
rozab
I find this article very unconvincing. The info-dump style reminds me of bad video-essays and stands in contrast to Feynman's speech. He describes the relevant aspects of cargo cults in a couple sentences, and uses it to make an enduring and effective point. His talk was not about cargo cults, it was about science!
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.
The history was a good read, but the conclusion feels like a strawman argument
> The cargo cult metaphor should be avoided for three reasons. First, the metaphor is essentially meaningless and heavily overused.
> Note that the metaphor in cargo-cult programming is the opposite of the metaphor in cargo-cult science: Feyman's cargo-cult science has no chance of working, while cargo-cult programming works but isn't understood.
This isn’t how I’ve seen the phrase used most often. People generally complain about cargo culting when management forces practices on a team that don’t work, nor are they understood. The “cargo cult” element describes the root cause of these ineffective practices as coming from imitating something they saw or heard about, but don’t understand. Using imitation as a substitute for experience.
For that, the phrase is uniquely effective at communicating what’s happening. People understand the situation without needed a long explanation.
I don’t see a need to retire the phrase, nor do I think this article accurately captures how it’s used.