It's time to abandon the cargo cult metaphor

Nah, we better abandon this kind of retroactive policing of language instead from people with nothing better to do.

Nobody who uses the term "cargo cult" in a technical settings does it out of spite or even refers to specific nations or peoples. Just refers to the core takeaway of a practice which might as we be all lore.

Care about politics and colonialism and injustice and what have you? There are 1000000 causes you could devote your time and make an active difference to people actually suffering this very moment, rather than language policing tech terms.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

It never sat right with me. Every time someone used this metaphor, an argument ensued over whether it was accurately applied or not.

What are some good alternatives to express the same concept?

This article claims that anthropologists, who are the natural and proper authorities charged with gatekeeping in this issue, have a different definition of cargo cults from the one of the popular imagination.

But their their definition is just academically abstracted, that's all, so that it applies to as many cargo cults as possible. The "cargo" ingredient in it, still refers to man-made goods coming from somewhere outside the island!

The specific examples of cargo cults given in the article pretty much exactly fit the the popular understanding, and nicely support the cargo cult metaphor.

Cargo culting refers to magical thinking in regard to some man-made artifacts. In computing it refers to the idea that people use processes, or artifacts like code, without understanding them, hoping for some good outcome, or at least the avoidance of a bad outcome. Personality worship is also implicated in cargo culting. Some great programmers decades ago did something this way in a famous system that was successful so we shall do it that way, and be rewarded with a replication of their success.

Those cargo cults which long proceeded WWII and do not revolve around airplanes and white man's goods, still support the metaphor.

And anyway, no one ever said that the metaphor is based on absolutely all cargo cults, or that it has to be. It is inspired by a few specific instances and their specific events.

Maybe anthropologists should use "cargo cult" more specifically and use a different word for cultural phenomenon resembling cargo cults in which some key ingredients are missing. Perhaps a people who only believe that they will be rewarded with cargo in the afterlife, but otherwise don't worship foreign human beings who wants visited the island as gods, and do not try to make imitation cargo for use as props in rituals intended to attract their second coming, should perhaps not be understood as practicing a "cargo cult". Or perhaps a "weak cargo cult".

The power of a word or term rests in its ability to discern. The more meanings you cram into a word, the less it discerns. Say that we agree that everything is a cargo cult. Then what's the point of using those two words instead of just the word "everything"?

There's also the question of origin. Okay so anthropologists have a definition of cargo cult, under which cargo cults can be identified going back hundreds of years. But might it not be that the popular cargo cult came first, and then the academics try to hijack the word for their own use? What's the story here?

People understood fruits and vegetables before science told them that a tomato is a true fruit, whereas an apple isn't. Therefore, science should have used different words for its categorization, rather than coopting farm-to-kitchen terminology.

So using cargo cult metaphor is considered a carbo cult?

If you have to explain in 5000 words how it would offend someone and hardly anyone really knows the backstory (or your version of it perhaps) before reading your 5000 word article, including the people you think could be offended, it probably means it's not offensive. Just sayin.