> 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
"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...
The truth is, _many_ people are fed up with the dominant leftist dogma that permeates almost every area of culture, government, and the economy today. We can argue until the sun goes down about the nature and specifics of what that entails, but people are reacting to _something_; it does exist, irrespective of any failure to describe it well.
And most leftists I know absolutely hate performative progressivism. Dems are widely mocked in leftist circles for doing stunts but not doing anything to help. Like Pelosi wearing Kente cloth while doing nothing to aid African people.
So please, you might actually have people who agree with you in the leftist camp, stop bundling us with the Dems.
However, when folks do it, you know that they are just un-self-critically engaging in something that they putatively dislike in other folks.
Not to get to annoying on the topic, but I do find it fun to unpack.
Ironically, the hated "I know this, so everyone should change their behaviour" position is central to the idea that "we [HN] are fed up with the constant identity-politics culture-war bait."
That claim is about who "we" are, and it's stated with a great deal of certainty, even if there is a bit of cowardly rhetorical hedging.
And that claim is supposedly consistent because the claimant has over-determined the "we":
so that claimant isn't making a universal statement, just a statement of "I" and the "We" to which that "I" belongs.
Which seems like a pretty normal move- notice the concern with "_many_ people" and the demand that we don't look too far into what that population might actually mean.
I've been on HN for a decade, have some karma, and no, I am not part of that "we" apparently- a fact for which I am grateful, as I am grateful I don't feel compelled to vote for capitalist Democrats.
Still, I think that it really is worth not looking too deeply into what they are saying because their point will be lost: they get to say who "we" are and what kinds of things "We" are sick of, and they don't feel bad about it because it's not univeral, so the cowardly hedging that they did means they aren't being hypocritical.
I personally don't care if folks are hypocrites though, because it makes for a pretty cool set of tea leaves to read about where folks minds are at.
I come here specifically because I try not to hang out with the kinds of sociopaths that wreak havoc on my world via badly implemented technology, but it's an easy place to check their general mental weather.
So, yeah, they aren't gonna agree, see the internal contraditions, understand the distance between lefitsts and performative DEI folks, etc.
But, happily for me, they will keep displaying their terrible opinions so I don't have to rebuild connections with real-life assholes just to keep my ear to the ground about what horrible new thing is coming to our world.
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.
The cargo cults were made by people who were enslaved and violently oppressed and then believed that cargo they were forced to create for their oppressors (e.g. flour, rice, tobacco, and other trade) should belong to them
I'm not sure that was in the article was it? These were exotic goods brought from overseas.
I'm not trying to say there was no oppression, but the examples in which they believed the trade goods should belong to them were still about trade goods which arrived by boat.
"[The leader proclaimed] that the ancestors were coming back in the persons of the white people in the country and that all the things introduced by the white people and the ships that brought them belonged really to their ancestors and themselves."
(edit - certainly these goods may well have been produced through the oppression of other peoples elsewhere!)
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.
> "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.
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?
"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.
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.
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.)
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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".
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.
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[1]: Agile is an adjective, not a noun.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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."
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 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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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!
> 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?
> 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.
>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.
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.
A person could perfectly well understand how radios work, while still constructing bamboo ones to receive messages from spirits.
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.
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."
wait, when was this? is there a linkable example? (i don't doubt you, but that's pretty bad)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/let_a_thousand_flowers_bloom#...
[1] https://playjustsaying.com/idiom/let-a-thousand-flowers-bloo...
The author deliberatly reaches outside of these scopes to contruct an argument that circumvents the situational semantics.
This feels like another attempt of non-constructive language policing, contributing nothing more than deconstruction without improvement.
Incidentally, we had a 10 minute meeting to 80 staff where someone tried to explain that we ought not use the word 'guys' on grounds that it could feel exclusive to some. Thankfully, it was pointed out that the literal definition of guys is: [Informal] Persons of either sex [0], which is what most perceive it to be. I don't think anyone's behaviour was changed as a result, but the seemingly trifling disruption did irritate a fair few people, and it was 10 minutes we never got back.
> the literal definition of guys is: Persons of either sex
I'm no culture warrior, but this isn't accurate at all. That's a definition, but it's not the usual one - ask someone "how many guys have you slept with?" and see how they interpret it.
To me, "guys" is the rhetorical equivalent of a code smell. There are cases where is obviously innocuous, like saying "hey you guys" to a mixed group of peers. But when the CEO says "I want to congratulate the guys on team xyz" in reference to a team with one woman... at minimum we can say his intent is ambiguous.
Similarly to the article above, during the meeting, no alternative was suggested. I like the word 'guys' for its casualness. If you're at risk of being perceived as somewhat authoritative, it can help induce a more casual tone. I thought about 'peeps' but that's too casual (and frankly weird, in a business setting). 'Everyone' is far too sterile. 'Ladies and gentlemen' is weird. 'All' (e.g. 'hi all') is also impersonal.
Workplaces could over-analyse and pick about minutiae all day long, and how productive is that? I reasoned that if we are going to pick about minutiae, then it should at least be the worst of the worst offences, and should be accompanied with some alternatives or solutions. Not just "Don't do <x> because I said so" type of thing.
It's almost as revealing as "Yikes, there's a lot of issues to unpack there. Top of mind is the absence of guardrails around inappropriate language and metaphor."
Quite how we've reached the point where political persuasions are linguistically distinct I have no idea.
Just look at how their usage is promoted in this thread to defeat supposed evils elsewhere in the language.
What I said is it is a sign of language policing, and that means a sign of the sort of people that like to deliberately misinterpret things so they get to be offended and virtue signal about the response. Normal people, unlike myself, simply shut up as a defence mechanism.
There's actually nothing wrong with the existing generally used words.
I'd be legitimately surprised if you know at this point.
I didn’t succumb to the pressure of heresy. I simply grew up and realized that it wasn’t actually that useful of a tool for explaining first principles or encouraging people to learn things from a first principles perspective.
My experience was: If a person felt like they already identified as someone who understands idea from first principles, the cargo cult story didn’t incentive them to question their understanding.
I also found if the person didn’t identify as someone who understood things from first principles, then the implication that they were implicitly being compared to clever primitive people. It wasn’t exactly reassuring and motivating.
At some point, people need to grow up and realize these conversations aren’t always about trying to censor people or to construct new heresies to use as instruments of cancellation.
Sometimes we need to have these conversations so we can reflect on what we say, how our words make people feel, and if they’re actually effective at accomplishing what we hoped those ideas would accomplish.
Zoom out and look at the bigger picture.
That there is *NO* gap between theory & practice.
Sounds familiar?? I cant find it now, someone please help?
EDIT:
And Programmers, unlike Cargo Cult Psychotherapists of TFA's source, do quantitatively try to make deals with the spirits (in the machine)???
"In theory there is a difference between theory and practice - in practice there isn't"
-- Not [Comrade] Yogi Berra
The real reason to stop using the catch-phrase is that it no longer has much power. When Feynman used it, it grabbed people's attention. It was a way of saying "this is religion, not science". But endless repetition has diluted its effect. Better to just say "practices based on tradition or faith rather than understanding and demonstrated efficacy tend to under-perform", or something in that vein.
Or think up a new metaphor. Overused metaphors stop being effective.
Feynman was a consistent asshole, the term is not the best, but you're going too far on your sensibilities to the point that you're not reasonable anymore (hint: Melanesians need to defend their culture, not you).
Chanring your words without changing the white messiah attitude means nothing.
Side note: this is true of most religions throughout history. Bret Devereaux has a great series on this [0]. The bulk of religions throughout history and space more closely resemble what we would consider to be a magic system than they do the Abrahamic religions or Buddhism. They're fundamentally a practical set of rituals that were/are believed to have practical effects, irrespective of belief or morality.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polythei...
This is especially true in mainline protestantism, which rejects most forms of ritual altogether.
When people accuse evangelicals or whatnot of magical thinking they're not talking about the same thing that I'm talking about here.
> I was raised Baptist, and my parents attribute pretty much any good fortune for our family to divine intervention, to this day.
This is similar in some respects, but a key difference is that for most Baptists they don't believe that the Divine intervention came by performing a specific ritual. It comes by the will of God through the grace of Christ. Many Baptists will even firmly emphasize that your morality plays no role in whether God will intervene, so even the moral component doesn't serve the role of ritual.
> I know Catholics who can instantly name the patron saint who can be asked to intercede on just about any topic.
Catholicism in general is an exception to this, especially as practiced in places like Latin America. There, there is a large ritual component that does bear a strong resemblance to these kinds of religions.
But it's easier to warn people from extrapolating from Abrahamic religions in general than it is to warn people from extrapolating from "Evangelicalism, Protestantism, Islam, Judaism, ...". The exceptions will be discovered, as long as you can interrupt the initial impulse to immediately associate things with what you already understand.
Mind you, I'm dreading what the next form of witch hunting will be...
When you observe someone publicly doing something that they think is virtuous, why is your first assumption that they’re broadcasting it cynically, rather than that they’re simply being virtuous in a public setting? Most people don’t think that way.
I have no problem with the majority of a group directly affected by a nomenclature requesting a change. Where I start to have a problem is when someone not directly affected starts championing it on behalf of some nebulous group that until then has said little on the subject.
For example: git master branch. We had a HUGE kerfuffle over that, to the point where even GitHub now gives git init examples that create and rename the master branch to "main". This was a pointless exercise that served no useful purpose other than to make a bunch of social justice warriors feel important.
Building special programs to lift people out of poverty is a good thing, especially for marginalized groups, but Affirmative Action was an abomination that only hurt those groups by reinforcing the stereotype that they're less capable.
Same goes for what DEI mutated into over time. The backlash we see today is because they went WAYYYYYYYY too far (because the politics of these things are always "keep pushing"), and so now that it's swinging the otherway, we're going to throw the baby out with the bath water. Everyone loses.
> When you observe someone publicly doing something that they think is virtuous, why is your first assumption that they’re broadcasting it cynically, rather than that they’re simply being virtuous in a public setting? Most people don’t think that way.
Most people don't think that way CONSCIOUSLY, but people do crave status, and will subconsciously tweak their beliefs to put them on the virtuous side of whatever they're doing, even when bullying others to lift themselves up (dragon slaying). This behavior is as old as time, and must be fought against whenever it rears its ugly head.
Does changing my git branch naming practice harm me? No. Does it encourage me to be more thoughtful about how I use language in general, even if that particular case probably doesn’t really matter? Yes. I see that as an absolute win.
By the way, Git’s release notes explicitly mention a desire to “wean ourselves off of the hardcoded ‘master’”[0]. GitHub is just following the intended use of the tool that it wraps.
> people do crave status, and will subconsciously tweak their beliefs to put them on the virtuous side of whatever they're doing
Why is it bad that people try to be virtuous, and why do you think that wanting to be virtuous implies a desire for status?
[0] https://lore.kernel.org/git/xmqq5za8hpir.fsf@gitster.c.googl...
And that's how it's done: by inverting the rules of evidence from "prove that it's harmful" to "prove that it's not harmful" - usually followed on with something to the effect of "It's just a small adjustment... Why are you so adamantly against it? Are you one of those bad intolerant people?"
It's insidious because people are afraid of being on the wrong side of things socially, which makes them easy to manipulate in this way. But there are those of us who will stand up and say "No. The line stays where it's at until you can prove your claim with strong evidence."
> Why is it bad that people try to be virtuous, and why do you think that wanting to be virtuous implies a desire for status?
And there you go again putting words in my mouth, twisting things just so, in order to push me into an untenable position.
The rude person often is the one policing others by taking a person's figure of speech and applying a moral judgement completely outside of the speaker's intended context. Offense is taken, not given.
If you want to maintain the moral high ground when you criticise people for policing others, don’t instruct people which emotions are valid or invalid for them to feel in response to your actions.
Memes will always circulate in and out of fashion. I don't think Ken is trying to kill the meme with his own hands (there are, at most, a few thousand hackers who will read this or care what he thinks) or worse, "signal virtue" (I can't imagine why he would care what anyone here thinks, and I'm sure he knows he would find disagreement here). I think what he's actually doing is delivering confirmation to a subset of readers---probably those who already had doubts---that the meme is dead, and it's time to move on. It's the same thing that happens when some faceless corporation's twitter account parrots some joke that used to be funny to make the brand more relatable or trustworthy, but instead it's a faceless hacker news account misusing an insightful term popularized by a great physicist in hopes of also appearing insightful.
I also don't think he is writing this for any "culture war" reason; I think the post may have been inspired by pure annoyance---see his 2013 post listing "cargo cult" and other phrases he's "tired of seeing." [1]
He doesn't call the phrase racist, or hateful, or offensive, or morally wrong. I didn't interpret the essay to be "policing language" or "catering to imaginary offences [...] on behalf of some supposedly marginalized people" or saying that "everyone should change their behaviour" or starting a "hyperstitious slur cascade." Melanesian history just happens to be where all the interesting information lies, and I thank him for collecting it. Thousands of words about the real reason for the post (lazy hacker news commenters) would be a total waste of bytes. Maybe people are interpreting a shirriff-style super-in-depth essay through the lens of "people only write this much when they're really angry"?
If you disagree with ken, maybe you think that the phrase refers to an important enough concept, or you like explaining the story, I think that's a reasonable stance to hold, and you should hold it without feeling so personally attacked you need to comment to fight back. I just think you might be clinging to a dead meme that's already used increasingly by people who like to seem smart by using an indirect term like "cargo cult" instead of "doing things superficially" or similar, and it's your choice whether you want to be lumped in with them.
I'm of the opinion that attempts to police language in cases like this, is at best a waste of time.
That said, the article would have been a lot better without moralizing about harmful colonialism, or claiming that this metaphor is supposedly an insult.
The purpose of this metaphor was never to gain historical insights, or to teach a lesson about colonialism, or to judge the Polynesian natives from 80 years ago, it's to teach a lesson about modern practices of software development (or science I guess). It's a fable.
You can replace the Polynesians in the fable with anyone else, and the payload of the fable does not change. Because the payload of it has nothing to do with the Polynesians. I personally didn't remember that this metaphor was specifically about Polynesians and the war supplies. I remembered it being about some abstract tribes, possibly Africans and humanitarian aid supplies. Did someone explain it to me the wrong way, or was it me who assumed wrong from the fake photos? I dunno. It does not matter. I wasn't relying on this fable for anything other than a software development lesson. It was not a covert tool to justify colonialism, or to assert intellectual superiority over some historical tribes on the other side of the globe.
It's definitely good to know the historical truth – as I said, I genuinely do appreciate all the exposition in this article. But, if you package that together with the moralizing, it comes off as yet more culture war BS that I am so sick of.
The difference in motivation is very important. If you write with the primary goal to expose historical inaccuracies – that's great. Then I can trust you. But if you write with the primary goal to stop people from using offensive (in your view) metaphors, then the historical inaccuracies are just a convenient tool, a talking point, for you to achieve your real goal. Because if this metaphor was actually historically true, you would probably still find it offensive. And so if that's your goal, then I can't trust you to provide historical accuracy. I will suspect you of presenting selective evidence, and other tricks to further your goal. That is why your moralizing detracts from the article.
I didn't mix them up on purpose, and I won't pretend to be an expert on the taxonomy of the various Pacific Islander ethnicities.
Yes, the article does mention Melanesians by name. So what. It mentions other important things and people by name that I don't remember either. So what. Those exact names and identities are not important, neither to my point, nor to the point the article is making.
If by any chance that is not what you meant to come off as, you may want to reconsider low-effort passive aggressive one liners as your communication medium.
Your bias towards flippantly dismissing colonialism is insulting to those groups of people who experienced it. Do better.
In a context like this? Yes. I struggle to think of a phrase that bears the same relation to France or Germany, but can't think I'd care more. (I think I heard once that the "let them eat cake" princess was actually in Spain rather than France? But no-one cares)
Sounds like we're 'cargo culting' the phrase 'cargo cult'.
There's this idea that "everyone knows what is being talked about" when a term like cargo cult is used casually, and I don't think that's true for these little tech parables. Often, they're used rhetorically to try to win arguments by appealing to the authority of a piece of terminology being well known, in itself. The alternative is painstakingly constructing an argument bespoke to the actual details of the present circumstance.
Nevertheless, great read!
That's the bottom line for me: language is a tool, it's descriptive and not prescriptive. I accept that the term "cargo cult" has a negative history, but it doesn't have a negative present, and the current use isn't in any way aimed at belittling distant tribes.
tl;dr We get to decide what words and phrases mean, and what utility they have, we don't have to be bound by the history of the thing.
I think that's a good heuristic to apply.
I think “cargo culting” in the popular sense means little more than that (whereas actual cargo culting is much more complex, as the featured article describes).
something happened but you’re not sure why, so you guess it’s because of something you did, and you decide to ritualistically repeat what you did in the hopes that thing that happened before happens again.
It’s a misunderstanding of cause and effect - so when you repeat the cause, looking to repeat the effect, you’re puzzled that it doesn’t work this time.
[0] https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/postmoder...
First, you can call it out as wrong. But I have never seen such "enlightenment campaigns" succeed. Nobody likes smartasses that write "accctttuuuaaalllyy" articles.
Second, "cargo cult" is a useful term even if not rooted in reality. That's also why it spread and persists. It fills a void that, for whatever reason, "bandwagon effect" never filled.
Third, speak for yourself. The zeitgeist moved on from moralistic language lecturing. The more you associate it with virtue signaling, the less will people adopt it nowadays.
I have met Ken (around the time that YC received an original Xerox Alto and he was one of the experts who got it working again). Ken may well be the least smartass person I have ever met.
I think you (and of course I don't just mean you, but anyone commenting here) should be more careful about publicly labeling other human beings.
I, for one, think that is pretty clear from the fact that I don't call the author by their first name. I did not write "Ken you're a smartass." Also, I did not write on his LinkedIn profile, I commented on a specific article.
In any case, it is but one of many comments and by up-/down voting, the community can send a signal to the author (if he reads here) as to whether he appears to be a smartass in this article. I think that is helpful.
I hear you that your intent was good! but that, alas, is not enough; a comment like that snaps to an ugly internet grid even though you didn't mean it to.
I don't think it's safe to assume that readers would understand that you weren't passing a judgment on the author. You called him a smartass.
I agree that, not having met Ken, you couldn't know how inaccurate and unfair that was, but you shouldn't have posted it in the first place. It's clearly against HN's guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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.
Anthropologists who take "cargo cult" seriously have let themselves be trolled by pop culture.
It's a bit like saying that Christianity involves handling rattlesnakes and putting nails through your hands in the belief that God will turn your fillings to gold. That kind of misses the point.
1. Foreigners visit island, riding on flying machines, bearing mysterious technology and products.
2. Foreigners disappear.
3. Locals worship foreigners as gods, develop a legend that foreigners will return, and use ad hoc hand-made objects whose shape resembles foreigners' technology to summon them, such as model airplanes made of bamboo, or pretend radios.
It might all be based on a single anecdote, and that is obvious to anyone with two brain cells. There might have been as few as one actual "cargo cult". I don't suspect anyone believes there were anywhere near half a dozen of these, let alone tens or a hundred or more.
A single anecdote is enough for a working metaphor.
The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre was one particular episode in history, in one place in the world. Yet we can bring up that name in any situation where the wrong incentives backfire.
"Byzantine generals", anyone?
1 - Become as relevant as Mr Feynman
2 - Get invited to CalTech to give a commencement speech
3 - Share your personal opinions there.
In the age of digital soapboxes, everyone feels their opinions are relevant - and many people try to leverage virtue signaling to get audience appeal, as followership has become a metric for quality.
This feels the case. I think that if we look hard enough we could be offended by everything and anything. And I think the heightened sensibility to be offended these days correlates negatively with overall societal intelligence.
Intelligent people have flexible mindsets to discuss and hence not so open to sensibility. People who follow others people mantras, not so flexible and reject what they doesn’t fit in their views.
It might not have been at a commencement speech, but didn’t Feynman say, “Have no respect whatsoever for authority; forget who said it and instead look at what he starts with, where he ends up, and ask yourself, 'Is it reasonable?“. You are doing your hero a great disservice. Or perhaps you have a specific opinion on the article.
To further complete the picture, I wrote this while sitting in the toilet, passing gas, while smoking my morning cig. Hardly the pinnacle of my day (but an adequate context for the articles quality)
I respect your views, we all have noses, I don’t care much for yours and you probably should not care much about mine either.
Live long and prosper.
So even if I greatly respect this guy when he talks tech, in this case, sorry, no. Big no.
More specifically, checking the etymology, "ojalá" seems related to the (old?) Arab idiom "wa sha Allah" (transliterations differ), roughly meaning "and God willing", which matches an equivalent Spanish idiom. I can't see how this has ever been insulting at any point in history.
Honestly, I think your colleague is virtue signalling hard.
Similar examples: * The tragedy of the commons - this is an extremely useful parable to invoke a game-theoretic / social behaviour concept. However, it is apparently historically inaccurate - at small scales, societies were able to protect and look after common lands, because of other societal factors such as reputation; the actual loss of the commons came not from overuse by the unlanded but from people who already had their own land taking more and fencing it off. Nevertheless, in larger scale societies, the principle of over-exploitation of shared resources in the absence of a mechanism to prevent that is a real and valid concern, so the analogy has a lot of value. * The use of probably apocryphal fables like 'The boy who cried wolf' have immediate meaning when it comes to concepts like alarm fatigue. * Many religious analogies have persisted in societies that don't hold the original religious belief. 'Holy Grail', for example, as an analogy for a desirable outcome. * Concepts from popular fiction sometimes become analogies too. "Golden Path" for example.
Not every analogy makes sense in every circumstance, but they are useful as a mutually understood shorthand to convey concepts.
Have you thought about an alternative concept or word that describes this phenomenon that could be used instead?
Look, these people were seriously believing some ridiculous junk. Most Europeans once believed some ridiculous junk. There's millennia old ridiculous junk still being believed. It's all "cargo cult".
In any case, I enjoyed reading the history too.
I think "magical thinking" would be an appropriate term for what Feynman characterizes.
However, one of the post's important points is that we're not even using Feynman's mischaracterized explanation of cargo cults: it's become a generic negative descriptor for anything the user considers insufficiently justified, even if the underlying rationale is not "magical."
Cargo-culting is the belief that specific best practices which are causally connected to an outcome in one context will produce those outcomes in other contexts where the chain of causal reasoning no longer holds. For example, "I survived the car crash because I was wearing a seatbelt. Now I'll install a seatbelt on my bicycle too."
Cargo-culting is an important concept in its own right in the tech industry, because those best practices do get often blindly shared, recommended and even enforced into codes and standards, even when the context that made them a good idea is lost. Without a concept like "cargo-culting" to label the fallacy, it can be hard to argue against that proposal, because the side recommending the change has lots of out-of-context data in their favor. For example, "car-crash survival rates are much higher when drivers are wearing seatbelts. Therefore, we're now requiring bicycles and motorbikes to have seatbelts."
It appears that there are some people (like you and the post author) that are constantly confronted with someone screaming "cargo cult", which has to be exhausting. But it's absolutely not the world others live in. In my world, it comes up every now and then (I'd guess every 3-4 months), and I've experienced it multiple times that I mention it and the other person hadn't heard it before but absolutely LOVED the term after an explanation because it describes certain behaviors so well.
Or in other words, magical thinking doesn't imply the lack of a conceptual connection: airstrips and planes landing are definitely conceptually connected. Magical thinking is the drawing of illogical causative connections from conceptual ones.
(I don't run into "cargo cult" that often. But I think TFA is a great writeup of why it's not the best term; as engineers, I think we should aspire to use the best terms available to us.)
That's not what I usually encounter. I see people imitating something they've seen others do (who appear to be successful) without understanding the full concept. Their efforts are in vain because clearing the brush for an airstrip doesn't make the planes land, and neither does one deliver projects more successfully by changing nothing except asking everyone to join a daily meeting each morning.
Thank you for the amazing thoroughness in your research. I just read aloud the entire article with my kid. So many tributaries of history and science to explore later.
Things that I referenced in our discussion about this article.
Memetics and how ideas spread as contagion https://richarddawkins.net/2014/02/whats-in-a-meme/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania
How slang, and low fluency spread from person to person can create divergent dialects.
The apocryphal story of cutting the pot roast to fit the pan. How things start true but get transformed through transcription errors. The main theme and the message may be retained, but the specifics get jumbled up.
Great Sunday read!
i am fond of using the cargo-cult analogy, and invariably many people have not heard of it so the story is told and retold. i'm fairly happy that my usual descriptions of the phenomenon were much less inaccurate or exaggerated than they could have been; generally closer to the John Frum reality than the "pop-culture" one. not at all like mondo cane (which i was unaware of). for example, i've said something like "to this day, there is a cult in which members paint themselves USA 'uniforms' and march in military style with 'guns' made of sticks'" (which appears accurate). i completely missed, however, the pre-ww-ii "cargo cult" beliefs which add quite a different perspective.
unfortunately, i don't know if i quite agree with abandoning the metaphor. the literal Feynman quote is about science. we in engineering have co-opted the term and use it (when imho done correctly) in a Feynman sense. i describe it as an Feynman anecdote. but it is one with significant grains of historical truth.
i find the curated list of HN examples illuminating because it appears that 1/2 or more of them are using the analogy poorly, missing the point, or simply as a kind of slur. meta-cargo-cult if you will. it is as said: "is simply a lazy, meaningless attack". i agree that it is heavily misused.
but in the conclusion, this leads to an argument that i see as a bit of a false dichotomy. i don't agree that Feynman's central point was either "doing something that has no chance of working" or we (mis)use it as "works but isn't understood". when Feynman said "but it doesn't work" i think meant within the analogy it didn't work: the planes did not show up. i don't think that when applied to science or engineering it only applies to something that "doesn't work". i think it's very much more about the central fallacy at play: misunderstanding processes that are built to support the science as being the science itself. misunderstanding effects for causes. misunderstanding and generalizing specific observations where they don't apply.
i think Feynman's anecdote is close enough to the anthropological one and not really detailed enough to be considered wrong. it's factually true that john frum cultists do what they do. the reasons they do it aren't quite right in our stories, but clarifying all the anthropological history doesn't kill the analogy, it might even strengthen it.
to me, used correctly the analogy is describing a religious or cultish adherence to principles that are not understood, in the hopes of some desired affect happening. it's similar to affirming the consequent. the fact that real cargo cults developed prior to ww-ii in places affects the story telling, not that its a cult. the fact that it's dangerous and harmful to the adherents is a good point for the analogy. the fact that the cults developed partially as a result of decades colonial oppression and mistreatment is a better framing than "look at the dumb thing those ignorant savages did". the fact that the cult members are expending energy which harms them for reasons they do not understand is still the truth. i've certainly never been as glib as "US soldiers show up with their cargo and planes, the indigenous residents amusingly misunderstand the situation, and everyone carries on."
the points about it being insensitive are well taken, however. no doubt.
- certainly there's a large amount of misuse of the analogy. and these uses are misused whether it be relative to pedantically accurate anthropology, Feynman, or pop-culture variations. but people using an analogy wrong does not make the analogy wrong.
- i think it's fine to use an anecdote and an analogy to communicate an idea about a harmful phenomenon. the anecdote does not even need to be true at all. but in this case it isn't too far off, depending on the story telling. Feynman's short description doesn't seem as extreme as what is described as the "pop-culture" definition.
- it can certainly be told in a way that is very culturally insensitive. i think this could also be done in a more neutral manner, but it's something to be careful of for sure. certainly, sticking closer to the history would probably improve things, however this may be the achilles heel. (in other words, out of all the reasons for abandonment given, i'm most convinced by this one)
- the biggest issue, for me, left is this: what do you recommend replacing this with if we avoid it altogether? the imagery of religious behavior is a big part of what that analogy covers. and the ideas of observing something and then copying those behaviors to achieve a result without any real understanding.
anyhow, thank you for a very thought provoking article. i'm clearly not as good of a communicator as you are (or Feynman).
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.
in either cases it's still highly apropos to the engineering analogy.
did you (hypothetically) add an unnecessary statement because you observed "good" programs doing it and believed if you did the same your program would be better? or because you thought you were facilitating something that was needed to be done to support something that isn't needed or won't happen? to me these are two sides of the same coin.
i've seen these kind of things (these are quick examples of the top of my head, not the worst things by far):
const char *str = "hello\0"; // make sure it's null terminated
if (ptr != NULL) free(ptr); // don't free if not allocated
Taking it out of the superheated culture-war lens, let's examine a more chill example: There's a popular meme with a girl crying and pointing and a cat sitting at a table. After some number of years somebody online pointed out that the panel on the left is some reality-tv personality going through a genuinely terrible life experience. They were sort of implying that everybody on the internet should stop using the meme for this reason.
Most of the arguments in either direction have thus-far been name-calling (due to culture-war nature). I'd be curious to see a well-reasoned from-first-principles argument in either direction, though curiously never have.
The only argument for not using the meme here would be if _the actual girl in the meme_ wrote an open letter asking people not to use it publicly because every time she sees it she feels those emotions again or some such. I would definitely stop using it then--not that I use that meme to begin with, but that's really besides the point.
I don't care if some rando online wants to police speech. They have no power or right to do so. They are free to have an _opinion_, just as I am, because again, Freedom is a very important right. And they have no right to limit any of my rights, unless my exercise of some right infringed on a higher right of theirs e.g. I cannot claim to have the Freedom to negatively affect their Life.
And, importantly, I think some third-party claiming they are hurt by the use of that meme on behalf of the woman in the photo is not a tenable position. They could only do so if she had expressed the desire for people to stop using the meme, in which case it would still not make a difference whether such people felt hurt or not, but rather that the actual woman was hurt.
There's your argument from first principles. QED.
---
1. I'm handwaving this hierarchy of rights and the existence of natural rights, but hopefully it isn't too controversial to claim that the Life is the paramount right and Freedom should follow closely. I've thought long and hard about this and could never find a better hierarchy. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that every other right derives from just those two rights and their hierarchy relative to each other and to all other rights, but since I have no degree in Law or Philosophy to support such a claim robustly, I can only propose it as a thought experiment left as an exercise to the reader.
I believe such a claim can be robustly supported, and it is my hope to one day do so, ideally supported with a degree of philosophy. Your perspective is, in some ways, quite similar to my own, though it also has notable differences. I do believe it can be rigorously argued, for example, that Life is an outcome of Free Will, not the other way around. I believe it can also be shown that Privacy (not the cybernetic privacy, or cyberprivacy, articulated with privacy policies, GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA) is (a) distinct from Free Will, (b) uniquely allows for the expression and development of Free Will, and (c) that maximal expression of Free Will is the global optimum for Life.
It's OK not to know the hurtful etymology of something; it's also OK to be hurt by it and to educate those who don't know. To me the best way that this goes is that 'hurt party' kindly explains to 'unknowing party' who, in turn, kindly agrees to abandon hurtful term, and everyone moves on with life. What often happens however is either that unknowing party pushes back (often aggressively), imagining their rights to have been infringed, or else hurt party opens the discussion aggressively, perhaps anticipating pushback before it materialises, or perhaps just already upset at having long been on the receiving end of hurtful behaviour but previously unable to speak up, often because of systemic bias (think: oppression of black people in 1950's USA just as one example among many). And then we get a super-heated culture war, which is really just mixture of people wanting to be heard and understood, and some people deliberately stirring the pot for ulterior reasons.
The answer to your question is thus another question - do you care if people suffer because of the actions of others? If you do, then try to be kind, and remember that being kind sometimes means making minor sacrifices to bring greater benefit to others.
I think if somebody directly offends you by calling you something you don't like, then from first-principles, it does seem like you're always okay letting them know that and seeing if they mind stopping. And most kind people would.
But in the meme-case it wasn't the lady in the meme asking people to stop, it was just some random girl on reddit. Same with the cargo-culting, I don't think the cargo-cults themselves are objecting, rather it is somebody objecting on behalf of another group.
Or the case of how we name our git-branches is even more indirect (since nobody is calling anybody anything, except a git-branch).
I'd love to hear some from-first-principles, emotionless arguments with clear proposals (e.g. If x% of people think term Y offends group Z, at what threshhold do we care? And does only group Z get to vote?).
In my experience a lot of these problems ultimately trace their cause back to some systemic imbalance that's often invisible to those on the 'winning' side of it. Take the idea of 'white privilege'; a lot of white people live in very poor or difficult circumstances, and probably don't feel privileged, but the real meaning of that phrase is that their situation would be even worse if they weren't white, and purely because of their appearance. So I think if you want proposals for dealing with these kinds of problem, then fixing the societal systems is where you want to look, rather than dealing with the proximate causes. Most of us can only work on the level of symptoms with this one though, hence my initial reply.
I perceive that the current state of language-policing is anarchy: anybody can all anything bad/harmful/problematic/ism etc. Often a small group suddenly decides that their personal judgments on language should be followed by all, and it makes the remaining majority bristle, particularly if they try to enforce it without bothering to make a compelling case and win popular support.
I perceived this blog-post to be one piece of noise in this free-for-all.
Perhaps it's time for a better system than anarchy -- such as setting a standard (majority vote of the affected group?).
This is not an attack on what you're saying and I'm not saying it even applies wholly right now, it just sticks out to me as a problem with any approach where "a majority of people publicly express an opinion" as a criteria.
What if the 'hurt party' is being unreasonable?
For an example - if you're familiar with The Expanse (great scifi if you like that sort of thing), then imagine you're a belter living on an asteroid, and for your whole life you've been called a 'skinny' by planet-dwelling types in a derogatory reference to your low-gravity physique, then one day someone calls you that without realising what it means except that's a common nickname for belters. The reasonable response from you would be to politely ask them not to, and explain why. The more likely response is one of anger at the insult, even if the other party intended no such insult. You're behaving in an apparently unreasonable way, but based on a lifetime of experience. The other person could return the hostility, then everyone is unhappy. Or they could respond with compassion, and the outcome would likely be much better for both of you.
Another thing that happens quite often, especially in the context of online discussions, is that a third party opens the discussion aggressively and/or condescendingly, explaining how the phrase is unvirtuous and insisting that the first party renounce it.
> ...hurt party opens the discussion aggressively, perhaps anticipating pushback before it materialises, or perhaps just already upset at having long been on the receiving end of hurtful behaviour but previously unable to speak up, often because of systemic bias...
It's understandable that people on the receiving end of what you describe should react badly; however the compassionate approach is to try to listen first, understand that the aggression or condescension may be an attempt to control the conversation out of fear of not being heard (a fear which may be grounded in experience), or a kind of emotional exhaustion at having been on the receiving end of hurtful treatment for a long time already.
So, you're right, that's not a productive approach, but I think it's more important how someone moves forward from that; if they dig in and fight back, then all we get is a war. Actually this applies in any interaction where someone is behaving unpleasantly towards you; if you can contain your natural defensive reaction and show kindness in return, you will often find that the situation relaxes, and maybe that person is upset for totally unrelated reasons - perhaps you just crossed their path at a bad time. And again, it's not OK for someone to shout at you - but the compassionate response will often make the outcome better for both of you.
Case you're describing: Person1 makes a statement, Person2 demands that Person1 not act like this. Person2's manner is a little aggressive (in hindsight, understandably) because they've copped this too much in the past already, even if this instance isn't particularly egregious and a milder approach would have been more suitable.
Case I'm describing: Person1 makes a statement, Person3 starts aggressively demanding that Person1 not act like this due to the harm that it causes Person2, and instead conform to Person3's espoused 'correct' behaviour. Person3 is seeking social power by using Person2's alleged hurt as leverage, while Person2 may not even be aware of the interchange, let alone harmed by it.
But here, you don't present any argument that your recommended course of action will have a desirable outcome, or any outcome at all.
Which, ironically, fits like a glove.
Fine, I get it, the term has been over-used and has consequently become meaningless. Orwell noted the over-use of "fascist", in 1944! Feel free not to use it. But surely you are not expecting some kind of outcome?!
The term "cargo cult programming" (or cargo cult security, or cargo cult science, etc.) is a useful term and if you hope to get people to stop using "cargo cult" you need to suggest something else that works at least just as well. Perhaps "ritualistic programming"?
Give me a better term to use.
The problem is that it accurately and concisely describes a pattern of behavior that I see all the time, where people at businesses don't do the hard work to understand what they're doing, and they just copy methods around, unknowingly increasing the amount of technical debt in the company.
Why be so obsessed with what things meant originally? Why not let things exist without patterning them to the past in grotesque ways that no one is doing? Language evolves, it isn't restricted to its roots.
Who, other than the obsessed, are being harmed by people using this language? Why do you care so much? What is the goal of the crusade to align historical interpretation with present usage? Is it because it is easy to win battles against ghosts?
These are not oppositional, dead code that does nothing doesn't make the planes land.
> Feyman's cargo-cult science has no chance of working, while cargo-cult programming works but isn't understood.
I disagree with this conclusion. Cargo cult programming is (for example) creating a microservices product without understanding and then when it doesn't work (it takes 20x longer, it didn't provide the promised decoupling) not understanding why. Cargo cult programming where the desired results are actually achieved in any meaningful way isn't cargo cult programming at all.
> The second problem with "cargo cult" is that the pop-culture description of cargo cults is historically inaccurate.
It's a language construct. It's not really important whether there is any connection at all to anything that has historically happened, so long as everyone has the same mental model of what it means. And as far as I'm aware, enough people do to make the term useful. Whether it's scientific nonsense isn't relevant. The same can be said for a lot of commonly used phrases like "Jedi mind tricks". It doesn't matter that this is a purely fictional construct. And it doesn't matter whether diehard Star Wars fans know exactly what it means. Most people have a vague understanding about in what sense it's used. The de facto usage is the real meaning.
> Finally, the cargo cult metaphor turns decades of harmful colonialism into a humorous anecdote.
I think this is the only objection that has any real merit. But I don't think it has enough merit tbh. It doesn't represent a current problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce
edit: typo
So it seems criticizing someone for cargo-culting should be a criticism of false metaphysical understanding of the world, rather than a false instrumental understanding of it.
That said, maybe the analogy could actually be stretched, but that would paint a rather different picture, with deeper implications. Like maybe there is a cult of the tech entrepreneur, with a certain teleology of utopia being brought with AI or something, with people cargo-cutting this by popping up chatgpt wrappers to summon the innovation and bring upon themselves mass wealth.
So like, the resolution to the cargo cult wouldn't be to teach them how to actually build airplanes, but rather to first dismantle their religious hierarchies, "correct" their religious beliefs, forbid or prevent their institutions of knowledge transfer replacing them with modern schooling, forcefully replace their epistemology with a "modern" epistemology, possibly using violence, promote certain ideals and social norms, etc. It seems to me that then and only then, with the epistemological groundwork, can the actual planes and runways be built correctly.
The author has a great point that “cargo cult” is used to describe anything in tech that someone doesn’t like. You could even say there is a cargo cult of calling things a cargo cult...
Also most of the time people call out "cargo culting" it's in defense of a system that is genuinely, needlessly obtuse, and amount to little more than "you're holding it wrong" complaints.
Like most of the insane (oops thats a bad word too now) language policing its mostly done by yuppies who feel some sort of non-existent transitive oppression for people they have no connection with, had no connection with, and read some history blurb and decided to create a masterpiece of verbal diarrhea on the internet. Of which this blogpost is no exception.
It's yet another example of the virtue olympics and a great sign we have been without war, famine, economic collapse, or food crisis for far too long. We have no real struggles so instead we focus on policing language.
I'll keep using master/slave/male/female/blacklist/cargo cult/insane, thanks. There's a reason progressivism is no longer cool.
As you may see, the pop-culture explanation of a cargo cult and the anthropological definition are completely different
What does the author think that "flag waving" and "marching" refer to?
(1) the metaphor is not to something actually readily popularly recognizable (despite being an image from "pop culture"; its true it comes from pop culture portrayals, but it is not the case that it is to a phenomenon which, outside of familiarity with the metaphor, lots of people are currently familiar with), which is why the (inaccurate) basis of the metaphor typically needs to be explained two people who have never heard the metaphor before.
(2) while neither the term nor the reference is that recognizable, for those too whom the term is recognizable, the use in the metaphor will often refers to a different thing than they are familiar with, either because their knowledge comes from the real phenomenon described by the term, or because they are used to different metaphors to the same inaccurate image. It therefore is not an aid to understanding even where the term is familiar.
(3) It doesn't actually, the way metaphor can, provide a concise way to describe a concept which would otherwise require a complex explanation. It's an exclusionary term that, because it requires explanation, makes people feel like part of an in-group, but it doesn't do anything to facilitate communication. It describes a practice being done by habit without an understanding of reason, or, more concisely, by rote.
I am sorry but this guy is way off here. What is really kicking you to write something like that?
Cargo cult refers to an idea, that is very well present today. And it should be highlighted. Here is an example: Turkey went on an infrastructure binge in order to "level up" their country. This is because of cargo cult misunderstanding. You look at the West with all these bridges, metros and skyscrapers and you think that's what made them powerful without realizing it is the other way around. The local elites were not fully corrupt but they engaged in a complex cargo cult.
Cargo cult has nothing to do with Christianity, the White, or the Melanesian people. It is a misunderstanding of the processes taking place because the people don't have the information required to build the models of what is taking place (ie: a plane).
The Melanesian people should get props for trying to compete and level their people up. The concept should be upheld as a cautionary tale of how this is not enough.
But it reinforced my use of the term.
We see it all the time in technology. Something will solve everything....
The current AI bubble?
> The people of the Yaohnanen and Takel area had seen the respect accorded to Queen Elizabeth II by the colonial officials and concluded that her husband, Prince Philip, must be the son referred to in their legends.
This sort of evidence-free leaping needs its own metaphor.
There is a lot more evidence of behavior of the sort you seem to have trouble accepting occurs.
For example, on your link, and cited from a book (so obviously credible): “Cult behaviors usually involved mimicking the day-to-day activities and dress styles of US soldiers, such as performing parade ground drills with wooden or salvaged rifles.” Which is at least as ridiculous as anything else.
The example I cited, of performing parade drills with fake guns without understanding their purpose while hoping they will cause some other effect, is more than sufficient to fill the accepted definition of cargo culting. There is no need to get hung up on specifics of airport rituals, which appears to be your preoccupation.
> Some people just want to be offended by reality. Things like this exist:
which nobody denied in the first place...
You said in reply > The article doesn't claim that cargo cults don't exist, they just work very differently and the story that Feynman shared is likely inspired by an exploitation movie from the 60s.
Except we have established that in substance the cargo cults are performing the main claim of repeating observed actions in order to provoke cargo, and there is no evidence for your pure speculation regarding where Feynman got it from.
Ironically enough, that means there is infinitely more evidence that the cargo cults were engaged in the precise thing you are so concerned about than your Feynman theories. He could simply have engaged in poetic license, or been, horror, told by a colleague that was there.
I think I made it pretty clear by now that nobody denies the existence of cargo cults.
> and there is no evidence for your pure speculation regarding where Feynman got it from.
Similarly, there is no evidence that the story as told by Feynman ever happened. That's my whole point.
> He could simply have engaged in poetic license, or been, horror, told by a colleague that was there.
That's exactly the problem. He likely relied on hearsay and gave a distorted picture of what cargo cults are about in general. The example he cites is neither typical, nor supported by the literature.
Look, I'm not saying we should stop using that word or something. I like it as a metaphor. At the same time, we can raise awareness of scientific facts.
You seem unwilling to join those dots, while being all too keen to conjure up other mechanisms based on no evidence whatsoever.
This whole discussion reminds me of when I made the mistake of using the idiom "the devil is in the details" near a religious literalist, who suddenly thought the important question was whether an actual demon was now occupying the details, as opposed to engaging in what the details are.
Sounds like "evidence-free leaping" to me ;)
The point is that cargo cults are far more complex than Feynman's story would make you believe. I had a wrong picture of cargo cults myself exactly because of Feynman and I learned a lot from the article and its sources.
It's quite easy to see how this happened in your situation, but it has nothing to do with Feynman, or any external stimulus at all.
:)
> it's hard not to get a wrong impression of the phenomenon
It really isn’t.
Your point is well taken: the idea of a cargo cult as described by Feynman never happened quite that way, and likely came from a work of fiction.
But that doesn't take away from the idea of a mechanically correct reproduction of a system that lacks the essential elements.
And I don't see that idea as being colonial or hateful; it's just an idea that relates to two cultures that are not understood by one another.
So thank you for the important point of correction; I learned something from your essay. But I will still understand the term when I hear it, and I will not censor others from using it, or correct them if they choose to do so.
The richness of language is a cultural value, just like tolerance. In this case, I think we can have both.
1. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-...
It amazed me a few years ago now to observe The Guardian in the UK running an article ruminating on whether the term BAME (an acronym for "Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic"), a term which itself had only just about escaped the halls of academia and left-wing journalism, was no longer fit for purpose and should be denied and now considered racist. The dragon was eating its own tail in real-time on that one.
I also didn't know about the ties of Christianity with cargo-cultism lol.
> Note that the metaphor in cargo-cult programming is the opposite of the metaphor in cargo-cult science: Feynman's cargo-cult science has no chance of working, while cargo-cult programming works but isn't understood.
Is it used like that? I guess sometimes - I've also heard it used in the former, that there's software engineers that will adopt a practice in the hopes that it works, but even when it inevitably fails, they keep worshipping the practices by tackling it with the same tools and approaches (mainly in the context of OOP). Not agreeing with it just saying my observation
If you want to replace the expression "cargo culting", come up with a better succinct phrase that is as targeted to the modern phenomena it is used to refer to, and is as memorable.
(Good luck reaching Feynman levels of wit & charisma.)
For instance my father-in-law was in fascist (no kidding!) Italy which got attacked by fascist (Nazis!) Germany and had their farm ruined, their wine barrels spilled. Many members of his family wound up in Binghamton NY where their social networks channeled them into certain occupations. (Splits pretty well based on unionized/self-employed and across gender: construction, Italian restaurants, K12 education, hairdressers; my French Canadian and Polish relatives in New England seem to all be in law enforcement or some other kind of "first response", even the girls, except for the pro hockey player who now coaches college hockey and lives with his husband; if any of them tried to break into teaching at college, newspaper reporting, or things that other ethnic groups specialize in, they'd discover the same baffling barriers that black people would encounter)
A friend of my son has mental health problems I can't DX (e.g. "pathological narcissism" is a sign, i see "body dysmorphia" is a symptom even if it is a DX in the DSM) but his mom who grew up in rural China (educated, got a medical certificate which doesn't let her practice here, thinks it was a mistake because she knows many people who got really rich thanks to economic expansion back home and is seriously committed to an evangelical church that should teach her better) believes the DX is "possessed by demons" which was a culturally universal and common DX almost everywhere throughout almost all of human history and prehistory.
I worked for a startup where there were two Indians (a Reddy and a Juggernaut, Hindus will get a clear understanding of their social position based on that) who grew up in a village about 30 miles from Bangalore, got educated in that city, got more education here, and wound up working together where they stuck up for each other like blood brothers. Like many Indians I've met working in the industry, the younger struggled in the US, not least with the immigration authorities, and I tried really hard to communicate my sympathy, admiration and respect but failed as so I often have with Indians in his position.
Various "BiPOC" histories are equally valid yet basically the same story (farm to city via severe trauma) if you separate them from the label which erases the reality: e.g. still on the farm in Africa, got torn away against their will, deliberate destruction of their culture in the past, present (and future so long as the idea that "the holocaust should never happen again" displaces the reality that genocide happens over and over again,) etc which is general but can't really be understood without the personal specifics.
"Cargo cult", "BiPOC" and many other terms ought to get phased out and replaced by better and more detailed stories.
If she really believes someone is possessed by demons, I'd say it's a good thing that her "medical certificate" doesn't let her practice there.
Folk religion includes other practices which are illegal under the Communist regime and were also illegal under Chiang Kai-Shek.
In Hubei province, for instance, a family with a troubled child might seek help from a "fox medium" who might attempt to divine the problem by inspecting the ashes from burnt incense and then, if that fails, be possessed by a fox spirit who will tell the people involved how it's going to be. If people don't play along they may be "haunted" for months which could partially be a matter of laying down a strong memory but is also not a difficult feat to accomplish in a culture where there are small and large fox shrines everywhere and everybody gets a fox figurine when they are born (which you will put on an altar together with your partner's when you get married.) Arraigning scenes in a small village isn't that hard, particularly if the fox has a network of confederates who owe the fox a favor or are otherwise in its power.
C's mom may very well have seen these practices be successful herself and almost certainly knew people who knew people who had been helped.
That was psychiatry for most of human existence, I mean we've had Freud for 120 years, decent psych drugs for 60. Similar practices have been documented in Africa, Polynesia, the Americas, etc. Here people get multiple psychiatric hospitalizations but never a real DX or RX. Here I saw pamphlet funded by a pharmaceutical company that made it sound as if, with his prescription pad, a doctor transforms Ritalin from a dangerous addictive drug to a safe ADHD treatment just like the priest at the Catholic church transforms bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.
From a cross-cultural perspective our practices are a fad like everybody having gluten intolerance or autism and those practices are time tested. If I tried to do the same thing in modern North America, however, I'd have a much harder time.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/kang13338 [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262829300_Persuasio... [3] https://www.amazon.com/Uncommon-Therapy-Psychiatric-Techniqu...
In some cases it's a confusion be correlation and causality.
Aspects of "sympathetic magic" are definitely present the quasi-religious beliefs of cargo cults (John Frum, etc. [2]), granted they are also political and social movements.
I wouldn't say confusion. If you read Ramsey Dukes for example, a magician focusing on correlation rather than causation is the whole point. The belief is that a) there are non-causal aspects to existence; and b) it doesn't matter why it works, so long as it works.
That is, according to Dukes, a magician is intentionally uninterested in causation, and leaves it for the scientists to worry about.
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.
At the time, I was unaware of this term, and the explanation given to me was the "misunderstood" one, as explained in the article.
Since that incident, I, too, have pointed out patterns of "cargo culting" as/when I identified them. Not too many, but definitely more than a couple. More than once, I've repeated the same explanation. I've even used the "misunderstood" explanation as a fun anecdote to share at gatherings (both work, and social).
While I don't think less of the original person for referring to my team as a cargo cult (they were sincere in their criticism), the article will definitely stop me from using the misunderstood version of events as the "true" origin of the term. It will change the way I speak about it, even if I refer to this term in the future.
For that, I am grateful.
Cargo cults exist(ed), and like most religious systems throughout history they hinged on a belief that performing certain rituals would have effects on the real world. Some of them did, in fact, see the trappings of the European colonizers as a form of ritual and attempt to recreate the techno-rituals by creating effigies of the European technology.
Nothing in that story is fundamentally disagreed with in TFA. So while it's really helpful to be able to give more life to a previously glib anecdote, the metaphor is still very apt.
The main takeaway for me is that cargo cults were really not any different than most polytheistic religions (and therefore most religions) throughout history in viewing ritual as essentially a technology through which to access good things [0]. But I'm afraid that any new term derived from that insight would be even more problematic for trying to distill an even larger swath of human experience into a single phrase.
[0] See Bret Devereaux's Practical Polytheism series: https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polythei...
> In one unusual case, the islanders built an airstrip and airplanes did come. Specifically, the Miyanmin people of New Guinea hacked an airstrip out of the forest in 1966 using hand tools. The airstrip was discovered by a patrol and turned out to be usable, so Baptist missionaries made monthly landings, bringing medicine and goods for a store. It is pointed out that the only thing preventing this activity from being considered a cargo cult is that in this case, it was effective. See A Small Footnote to the 'Big Walk', p. 59.
Makes you wonder if one could land a job with a firm handshake.
Second, you’re impairing your own ability to communicate with doers because most smart people know what the term “cargo cult” means from Feynman.
Unsure which group you’re in after making this generalization
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...
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.
(Now I wonder whether Tamarian language is really referencing stories, or referencing the popular understanding of those stories. Sokath, his eyes closed.)
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.
"Grandfathered in" comes from the "grandfather clauses" in post-Reconstruction U.S. laws that allowed white people to bypass literacy tests and poll taxes for voting if their grandfathers had the right to vote. This excluded many Black Americans whose grandfathers had been enslaved and could not vote. This seems like a way more problematic term to use especially when you use it in public facing policies (such as keeping old pricing levels) that apply to your potentially black customers. That could actually be offensive. But it's not because that isn't how normal communication works. People don't go looking to take offense, they take offense when offense is given. Though I would happily expend the brainpower to replace this one.
"Rule of thumb" claimed to come from an old law allowing a man to beat his wife with a stick no wider than his thumb. This saying comes from normalized misogynist physical abuse in our society. Again, this one should go way before cargo cult.
"Cakewalk" originates from the 19th-century practice of enslaved Black people performing exaggerated dances that mimicked European ballroom styles, often judged by plantation owners. Winners were sometimes awarded a cake. This one is just straight up racist and should go way before cargo cult. Especially to represent something being 'easy'. I can't imagine it feels 'easy' to dance funny to entertain your violent owner. The only 'easy' thing was that is was a brake from the slave driver out in the field. You know what, f' using that term (damn I just reversed the point I was making on myself on this one but f' this term).
Heck English itself is problematic/racist at it's roots with it's tendency of saying the french sourced word is proper, and the non-french version is low class. When are we going to take back English from the imposed by violence for French conquerors French influences?
The world is already exhausting. Adding in this level of constantly self policing our thoughts/communication that, in the end, leaves us poorer with less tools for communicating concepts is lose/lose. If something makes people feel bad, yes we should change it. But going looking for reasons to be upset about things and reducing our vocabulary/communal communication over 'researched' outrage is a net negative and seems an Orwellian dumbing down.
That's absolutely fair and if that had been there point of the article, I'd be 100% behind it. I love learning new things about words and phrases. Etymology is my jam.
But no. That wasn't the point of the article. It's saying "you are wrong, you should feel bad, you're not allowed to use the thing you were wrong about anymore". I generally fall quite far on the left, politically. But when people talk about "woke nonsense", this is the kind of thing where I find myself agreeing with them, much as I did a couple of years ago when we were all socially pressured into renaming our "master" branches to "main" branches.
I didn't remember reading that in the article. Just as a second-check, I've re-read and none of what you say appears in the text. You're building a strawman.
> you're not allowed to
Specifically about this part, we're talking about someone writing on his blog about something he took the time to dig into and sharing his opinion. There isn't much the author can do to be less prescriptive, besides shutting up.
This trope of interpreting every counter-cultural opinion, in every form, as "the powers that be want to gag us" is a way of saying that you won't hear even the smallest dissent.
"The pop-culture cargo cult erases the decades of colonial oppression, along with the cultural upheaval and deaths from World War II. Melanesians deserve to be more than the punch line in a cargo cult story. Thus, it's time to move beyond the cargo cult metaphor."
for which the OPs summary is an acceptable paraphrase.
So someone writing their opinion on their personal blog is equivalent to some authority making a ruling about what you're allowed to?
Freedom of speech has always come with other people being free to tell you that you're wrong and should stop. There is nothing wrong in it, and no freedom of speech is harmed as long as the person stating their position is not in a position to enforce some form of authority.
People may not like what they hear, but feeling oppressed because someone wrote their disagreement on a personal blog is a pathological form of this free-speech rethoric.
You started dishonestly (accusing someone of distorting the article when they were just disagreeing with it), why would anyone now want to have a completely different conversation with you about "free speech"? Do you assume that everyone should want to censor everything that they disagree with?
> People may not like what they hear, but feeling oppressed because someone wrote their disagreement on a personal blog
Now people aren't allowed to feel? Why?
> is a pathological form of this free-speech rethoric.
Are you a doctor or something? Do doctors diagnose rhetoric? Is it "rhetoric" to say how something makes you feel? Why are you telling people how to feel, or giving lectures about free speech?
This one time I got a 'concerned' mail from a dude, remarking that he didn't like some of my public comments. It was longwinded, verbose and Very Serious. He tried to empathize with me by imagining what my politics might be, how I might feel about some of his remarks, etc.
The thing was:
- he got my politics completely wrong
- at no point did he actually cite a single concrete example
- he never actually asked any questions or clarifications
The entire thing was a one-sided lecture he was delivering to an image of me he had created in his head. Once you understand this, you understand woke and why so many people find it so unbearable.
Edit: “delivering to an image of me he had created in his head” - the author doesn’t know you, afaik. He probably didn’t send you this link personally after writing it. You yourself have decided that the article is targeted at you and that it is intended to be negative.
I’ve used the term cargo cult a hundred times. I generally think it’s a useful metaphor. I do not feel offended in any way by this article.
> You're building a strawman.
Given the large number of people in this thread who got the same impression from the article as me, I don't think so. I think this is the actual subtext of the article, stated simply.
> There isn't much the author can do to be less prescriptive, besides shutting up.
Actually there's a huge amount they could do to be less prescriptive, such as using phrases like here's what I'm gonna do but you can make up your own mind.
People count doesn't make sound logic. You will find large numbers of people believing the weirdest things, if you're so inclined.
> I think this is the actual subtext of the article, stated simply.
You used the sentence "you are not allowed". How do you think the blog owner will coerce you if you do not comply with his order ?
> Actually there's a huge amount they could do to be less prescriptive, such as using phrases like here's what I'm gonna do but you can make up your own mind.
Would you describe your own reply on HN as telling people what they're allowed to do or not to do?
If you have some terminology you don't like, provide an alternative.
Main is fine.
But like what is the alternative to cargo cult provided here? It's a very concise representation of a pretty complex idea.
"You are valuing the ritual associated with an outcome instead of the outcome."
Is that my alternative?
Main is more concise than master. But how do I boil that down without saying "cargo cult"?
If someone is unfamiliar with the common English term or is understands it is "by habit" but isn't getting the implicit comparison with a practice following an understanding of the underlying process it, like the image of "cargo cult" referenced in the metaphor, may need expanded a bit on first encounter, but it is both more concise, and uses direct denotation rather than metaphor.
This stuff isn’t harmless either. It helps push people toward the far right by making them sound reasonable.
I tried to explain to my parents why my daughter’s teacher recruited her into a “BIPOC” affinity group and they got very upset.
The kind interpretation of that video is that "there are always subgroups" but it really felt to me as if they were all lumped in the same bucket of "Indian" by the video producer which seems to me to be rather problematic itself.
But these trainings divide people up into groups—just along arbitrary lines. All of them put white people over here and “people of color” over there. But I suspect the second strongest affinity for most “people of color”—after their own group—is white people. Because that’s who people interact with the most often outside their own group.
The culture I’m most familiar with, after Bangladeshi culture, is southern British American culture, because those are the people I grew up around. If you subdivide people into any groups more granular than “American”—which I don’t think you should do—you can’t put me over there with the Taiwanese and Latinos as “people of color.” I don’t know anything about those people and have no greater affinity for them than I do for any random American.
My sister in law is Taiwanese, and all her friends are Chinese or Taiwanese. And they seem like lovely people, but I’m more out of place in that setting than I am in a room full of white people in Georgia.
I'm not sure it's fair to criticize the trainings; part of the reason for the training is to limit the employer's liability, and there's a huge variation in the liability of "being an asshole" depending on how -- and to whom -- the mistreatment is directed, so the training is going to invariably reflect that legal landscape.
Note that both of your examples given fall under the protected class of race/color. You still might have a more sympathetic judge and/or jury for one example or the other, so it might be relevant in practice, even if it is irrelevant by the letter of the law.
"white people" isn't real. That's why there is a concept of "passing", and why the KKK in my state marched against other white people. All these groupings are arbitrary on their face.
>But these trainings divide people up into groups—just along arbitrary lines.
How do you suggest material about how dividing people up based on the farce of "race" should be made? It needs to have some "in group" vs "out group" to demonstrate how that dynamic works. Are they supposed to use real and explicit life examples? Should every person joining your org be made to watch a training video where a white manager calls a black employee the N word?
Do you not understand the concept of film and acting and theatre? That you often demonstrate matters through allegory or metaphor?
Or do you also complain that Dr Seuss tried to educate children about racism with the "star bellied sneets" because it's just an arbitrary division?
You complain that "they were all wrapped up into the Indian category", but guess what, that's the same story for Italian Americans and the Irish and at one time that nobody seems to remember, the Catholics. "White" is also a horseshit made up group. There is as much diversity in India as there is in America.
Like I just don't get it. What would you rather have to help train adults about racism and how not to be racist?
My daughter has four “affinity groups” at her school. “Black girl magic,” “young black men,” “BIPOC,” and “LGBT alliance.” A teacher recruited her and some Turkish kid into “BIPOC” because they have no other non-black non-white kids.
It’s not just a demonstrative analogy. The people running these diversity programs think theses groups are real.
My suggestion that, since I am a rich white person, maybe I should start using it was met with an emphatic "no."
Hey, at least it's two letters -- 33% -- shorter.
But for new projects it really doesn't bother me that the default nowadays is "main" in stead of "master", was all I meant.
Also, “main” is far better name than “master” for the primary branch of a git repo for lots of reasons. Did it hurt anything to change the default? Why are you so attached to the old name? If anything it made our automation code better to stop having hard-coded assumptions of what the main branch was called.
Yes. Change always has a cost associated with it. In some cases, that cost is repaid with benefits. In this case, it hasn't and will never pay benefits.
> Why are you so attached to the old name?
Because I refuse to comply with self righteous busybodies who think it's their job to ensure that everyone is acting right. It was obnoxious when those busybodies were railing against comic books/rock music/rap/movies/video games, and it's just as obnoxious when they rail against "master" as a technical term.
And really, you're bothered by the idea that 'main' is a more neutral name for the default branch of a git repository, and want to cling to 'master', when that term has traditionally been used to describe someone who enslaves other humans? Really? You're that attached to something like a default branch name in a VCS? Or you aren't, but because it sounded like people were trying to make you feel bad about yourself for using 'master', you're just going to be obstinate and own those libs?
All that seems kinda spiteful and petty. You do you, I guess.
No, that's the complete opposite of what I said.
Please read again. The part where I said that the underlying message is "you are wrong, you should feel bad, you're not allowed to use the thing you were wrong about anymore".
If the message had been "you're wrong about something, here's the truth, now make up your own mind about whether you want to keep using it", I'd be completely on board with the article. My decision would probably be that I'm gonna keep using the phrase because all of linguistics is built on misunderstandings, mistranslations, and downright lies, so avoiding every phrase that has "bad" origins is a step on the road to 1984. But that's just like, my opinion, man. You can decide otherwise and we can all get along just fine.
I don't like arbitrary language policing, either. I think there was a much stronger case for eliminating "master"/"slave" than "master branch", for instance, and if people were to argue for eliminating "mastery" as well I'd consider that ridiculous. It's fine if you don't consider this particular argument persuasive, but if it's a step toward Ingsoc we've all already been sprinting in that direction for centuries.
All good and admirable, but
when I meet someone from the States and say I'm Italian, it usually ends up like this
https://www.alessandravita.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/12...
or this
https://static1.thegamerimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uplo...
or with a combo
https://preview.redd.it/italian-stereotypes-starter-pack-v0-...
It's not the words or the metaphors, it's the people!
If someone wants to use words against someone else, they'll find a way, no matter what.
Policing words is fascist, if anything, police people bad behaviour, actually, police how your society works and start investigating why you you masterfully created, nourished and spread to the World so many cultural stereotypes about everyone who is not you and doesn't want to be like you! They talk to us about you, it's not the words you use, but *how* you use them.
Try to understand that thinking "you person of color -> you bad" it's not any better than thinking "you [n word] -> you bad".
This sort of phrasing of one’s opinion is as old as essays and speeches themselves, as far as I know. Here is an english translation of a speech by Cicero, the one from which our good old lorem ipsum placeholder text was derived.
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cicero/de...
Of course it is sensible for a person to have an opinion on the conduct of others, and to express that opinion. Where is the problem?
Unless said author was in a position of power over me I would understand the “we should X” phrasing as kind of like… the standard way that opinions have been expressed throughout history…
"I think that people should do XYZ"
The reader knows that this is your opinion. They may reasonably presume these are your opinions and that you are not writing the essay at gunpoint or while under the influence of alien mind control. Furthermore, no reasonable reader would mistake your opinion for some sort of imperative they are compelled to obey.
(Now, I hope this isn't misconstrued to mean that all opinions should be expressed authoritatively and imperatively. That is not always the right tone.)
(I see from your comment history that you've talked about Typescript, and being Irish. Does that mean you don't actually write Typescript and you're, uh, not being Irish in a proper enough way? No.)
It's acceptable to discuss a societal issue even if you're not actively doing something about it. There are a lot of things going on in the world and a finite amount of hours in one's day. We can only personally reach out and touch a depressingly small subset of them. I think Putin is a rather malignant head of state, but I am not actively working to depose him, and I don't see a conflict there as long as I'm clear about that.
deciding that they need to "help" minorities that they've
never met in some way, usually by policing language or fashion.
As an admittedly contrived example, suppose we work at a majority-white company where white employees are openly using racial slurs against black employees. As a white person, I've got a responsibility to confront this and steer things in a better direction. If I'm in management then part of my job is to shape enact and enforce policies to keep this from happening.
I think we'd agree on that cartoonishly obvious example, but another key belief is that there are a lot of "lesser" racist acts that may not be as egregious as the "n word" but are still well worth combating.
Certainly, I think that any particular policy at any company is up for discussion. I've no doubt there's a lot of overreach in this area. Some companies are surely doing real shitty jobs, but the problem here is "companies doing real shitty jobs" and not the core idea of "hey, let's shape a good company culture here."
But I think you are making a lot of other unsupported assumptions: that these policies are enacted by "rich white people" with zero input from the groups they claim to protect, and that these policies are being enacted without other more material changes, and so on. Again: surely true in some cases, but I believe you are conflating bad implementations with bad ideas.
I think you'ce misunderstood me here. I strongly believe in positive, progressive social change, and I strongly believe that in a large part this has to come from the dominant section of society.
The issue I have here is with frivolous linguistic change wrapped up as real social change.
These SJWs, or whatever you want to call them, are essentially role playing at social change.
I will highlight again that I don't think these are all rich white Americans, just that that is where the movement originated.
Sure, they can force through a minor change (often entirely incorrect, in the case of master branch having anything to do with slavery, or deciding that latinos should be referred to as latinx even though the actual latinos seem to largely deride this term).
But that does exactly zero to improve anyone's lives, except for these few already mostly privileged SJWs who get to pat themselves on the back.
Meanwhile, the main actual change that has happened is that loads of people - potential allies - have been frustrated or even alienated by this whole foolish endeavor, and society as a whole has shifted a step to the right.
It's the word equivalent of numerology
I won't say that. As much as I frown upon the holier-than-thou attitude plaguing talks on social justice topics, the words we use do have influence on how we think and act.
Thankfully, there are many countries outside the US where this sort of 1984-style language policing is not accepted and we'll continue "clinging" to our "legacy terms", tyvm.
- Someone who has mastered some art;
- A teacher;
- The lead artisan in a team, the one who has mastered the art, teaches and leads.
The slave master is a very narrow interpretation on these meanings, and the woke push against the word is myopic. The word has a long history, none of it connected to slavery.
As for American English, wake me up when they rename Master's degree.
And yet, weirdly to me, there's a lot of people acting like it costs them personally to switch words.
I never gave this topic much thought when it first came up, because it never mattered to me in the fist place if the default branch was called "master" or "A1" or "πρώτα".
Someone wants it called different because of aesthetics? Sure, have fun with the new name! It's no more significant to me than "jif" (the cleaning fluid) being renamed "cif", or Marathon, Snickers.
Of course, if anyone were to have suggested to me that the name alone would be enough to solve racism forever, I might have pointed that the Berlin Wall's official name translated as "anti-fascist protection barrier", as an example of the way people use words to divert from a complete lack of real action or worse to act in direct opposition to the normal meaning of the words.
I don't think this concept is unique to Portuguese. Whenever anyone talks about, say, the dutch masters, they are not talking about slavery.
FWIW some of us in the USA will also continue using the original words as they were intended rather than injecting social issues into language and trying to control people with compelled speech. I for one put all the words back when people swap them out by using FoxReplace for Firefox, Word Replacer II for Chrome and nobody even notices unless I happen to quote them. The people trying to control language are quite selective. For example they have chosen not to tamper with "Masters Degree" but they will change master everywhere else.
This is the silliest, pettiest, snowflakiest thing I've seen in a while.
"Words can't hurt you" say people who are so upset that languages change through various means (yes even intentional! Ask the French) that they go out of their way to edit other people's content to say what they would rather it say.
It's really funny to decry 1984 Ingsoc as you actively rewrite your individual view of reality to conform to your sensibilities, as if that isn't exactly the same ideology.
Partially agreed. I am silly and petty in response to other people trying to force BDSM on me. They try to force everyone into Domination, Submission and Humiliation so I neuter their pseudo mind-rape and teach others how to do the same.
Why don’t we spend energy on getting to the issues we actually care about instead of standing on shaky arguments and calling it a day. It’s lazy thinking.
_late Old English mægester "a man having control or authority over a place; a teacher or tutor of children," from Latin magister (n.) "chief, head, director, teacher"_
So if we dislike the user of master, do we ban whip? Or any other term negatively associated with slavery that actually predates it? I think the actual answer is contextual, and in the context of git, there is no relation to slavery whatsoever for most of the worlds populace
The reason: because it was easier, it allowed corporations (especially Microsoft) to give the appearance of making social change, and because it distracted us from dealing with the real issues. In other words, laziness.
And you know what, if you're firmly on the progressive left, as I am, that's no big deal. It's annoying, maybe it alienates me from taking part in social action. But it won't, for example, change who I vote for.
However, we (the West) live in a period of history balanced on a narrow edge between social progression and social regression, with all manner of bad actors waiting on the wings to take advantage of our slipups. And this was a slipup, no matter how well meaning the people who pushed it through were. This, and many, many other small annoyances, were in all likelihood what it took to push a significant number of people to change their vote in the recent election. It's not the only reason, perhaps not even the main one. But any change is significant when you're balanced on an edge.
But also, small things do have to change. If nothing changes, the status quo remains, and the status quo is stacked against many people. (Because of gender, race, culture, wealth, location, etc). It's easy to say "focus on the big things" but the small things can change along the way too.
I'm strongly in favor of progressive social change. But when even the smallest of change takes this much effort and leaves people frustrated and alienated, we should not be focusing this much effort on insignificant changes. It's like trickle down economics - hundreds of minor changes like this will not trickle down into large changes. Most likely the opposite - they'll alienate and infuriate enough people over time to cause a societal swing in the other direction.
If we're gonna put effort like this into bringing about change, let's make it meaningful, something that effects our daily lives now.
There is nothing progressive about any of that.
I also recognize that in all of these things, balance and nuance are required and conflicts are common and won't always be resolved in a way that makes me, personally, satisfied.
> forcing language
This entire thread is a majority of people, on a generally quite progressive forum, arguing strongly against forced language change. I do not believe that the majority of genuinely progressive people want or believe in forced language changes, with the exception of a few specific ethnic and gender based slurs.
Thanks for making my point.
That is, in fact, a reason to ignore them. Even if you agree it's a problem (I don't), triage is important. Use your social capital on solving problems of importance, not on annoying people with solutions to minor problems.
[Citation needed], as they'd say on Wikipedia.
I don't think that's the origin at all. Why do you?
Some decent examples here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26504086
Googling "Master Slave audio manual" has a bunch of examples. E.g. this manual from 1959 - https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Catalogs/Ampex/Amp...
Though that Ampex manual isn't all that convincing in this context, IMO. It's about the hardware level, all capacitors and oscillators and stuff, in "master" and "slave" amplifying circuits. That has pretty much nothing at all to do with "master tape" per se; it's more like "master" and "slave" hydraulic cylinders in the clutch or brake system of your car.
Your HN link feels like a much better argument here. (Though I admit I haven't followed any of the links in it yet; going just by the quoted bits in the comment.)
As someone who has recently been converting our branches to use main everywhere because they were previously a horrid mix, I don't care what American politics thinks is linguistically problematic today. In other dialects where the word master is more common, it's not a problem any more than the word "owner" is a problem. I feel roughly the same way about changing master to main as my Guatemalan friend feels about the word "Latinx": I don't want someone making $350k in San Francisco telling me how problematic it is to speak my own language.
Take "owner". What’s a product owner in a SCRUM terminology? Is that the person that when leaving the company will keep full exclusive (or even communal) rights on the product? Or is that just corporate novlang to put motivation/pressure on the "wage slave" (to honor/take/loan/steal vocabulary from an other extremity of social perspective)?
I would guess that 90% of phrases and proverbs used in any language fall into that category.
As I understood from the article, "cargo cults" exactly as in the widely-used metaphor did exist; it's just that they were a small minority of what anthropologists call "cargo cults".
So it seems to me it's you who are being not only spiteful and petty but above all, just plain wrong.
For example:
Offer wage negotiation coaching to the bottom x% of earners in any given position in the company (or just straight up give raises to them unprompted). Such initiatives will by definition disproportionately help disproportionately disadvantaged demographics without codifying systemic racism/sexism/etc. The reason corporations don't do things like this is because they are interested in scoring brownie points without undermining the status quo class related power structures.
Similarly when providing scholarships, don't limit them to certain ethnicities. Doing so tends to mostly favor the members of the given ethnic group who are already well off. Instead make the scholarship inversely proportional to household income and select applicants randomly weighted by 1/income without regard to skin color.
Build community centers and libraries in poor communities regardless of who lives there. Give money to the ACLU and other organizations that help victims of abuse rather than tweeting a rainbow flag in June while simultaneously organizing an industry event in Saudi Arabia.
And above all, without incurring any actual monetary costs. (Unprompted raises??? Muahahahahaa!)
> Offer wage negotiation coaching to the bottom x% of earners in any given position in the company (or just straight up give raises to them unprompted)
1. What positions rate this treatment?
2. when do you stop doing this?
for example: you should learn that main and master mean absolutely nothing to 95% of the people of the World. In my language "master" translates to maestro, which predates US slavery and symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git). they are just labels to us,, if you are offended by that, there are a lot of other ways to cope than attack people who don't care about them and rightfully so.
Even in English, the term "master" branch has nothing to do with slavery. It originates from a master audio recording, usually just referred to as a master, from which other recordings are made.
Late Old English mægester "a man having control or authority over a place; a teacher or tutor of children," from Latin magister (n.) "chief, head, director, teacher" (source of Old French maistre, French maître, Spanish and Italian maestro, Portuguese mestre, Dutch meester, German Meister), contrastive adjective ("he who is greater") from magis (adv.) "more," from PIE mag-yos-, comparative of root meg- "great." The form was influenced in Middle English by Old French cognate maistre.
Exactly. Which is also (what at least I think) where "master copy", which has been claimed to be the origin of git's "master branch" comes from. Whether via the music industry's "master tape" as claimed elsewhere in this discussion, or more directly from the "master's manuscript" all the other monks duplicated in a mediaeval monastery's scriptorium, who knows... But zero to do with slavery, AFAICS.
This is not to say it’s fine to make ad hominem attacks to anyone on its vocabulary. But telling people they should silently accept to use words rooted in a notion of social dominance, doesn’t seem any better. There is a difference on pointing every occurrence of social practices that favor the spread of a domination system, and blaming personally the people who instantiate these practices.
The paradox I've observed people disagreeing with is you either believe in words having magic powers that, such that even if no one knew these connotations they would still have them, or you believe in keeping old connotations alive precisely so you can tell people to stop using them because of the old connotations.
Unilaterally telling others what words they must use is a domination mechanism, whoever engage in such a practice, don’t we agree?
If we don’t listen to what our words inspire to others, how can we know if it matches our intended meaning? If we don’t continuously hone our habits, including our language habits but definitely not only that, how can we progress as human individuals, collectives and societies?
>believe in words having magic powers that, such that even if no one knew these connotations they would still have them
The trick is simple to explain, isn’t it? We can perfectly be healthy carrier, and yet people will die from this virus we contributed to spread.
Just because something is untroublesome in our own specific case doesn’t mean it won’t contribute in the diffusion of something awful at societal level. That is, the only scale level at which we can measure how much benign or hurtful this thing is for humanity.
Except words aren't pathogens. They aren't complex molecular nanomachines that actively avoid our bodies' defenses while incidentally doing damage to it. The only effect they have is in what connotations they trigger in people. In this case, even if the word has troublesome origin, if approximately no one knows about it, then the person bringing up that connotation is the pathogen causing harm to people by convincing them to get worked up over a word, where they wouldn't before.
We can’t know what words will actually have on people until we release them. But we know that words we use can make a significant and measurable difference:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-minute-therapist...
https://brm.institute/neuroscience-behind-words/
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...
>if approximately no one knows about it
How close to "approximately no one knows about" are we in an antonym association like master/slave?
>the person bringing up that connotation is the pathogen
Well, that is what we can call focusing on the person rather than the social mechanism at stake, isn’t it? Kind of an equivalent to the mechanism through which we produce reactions like "look this bird of ill omen that pretends that there is an invisible entity passing from one person to an other but whose malign effect only reveal randomly, clearly this person is the actual cause of the issue".
For some in the US and those adopting this particular aspect of its culture. For everyone else... well, there's some hundred other antonyms that come to mind before:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/master
Apprentice, amateur, loser, subordinate, subject, secondary, incompetent, inexperienced, junior - to list just a few. The only form of "master / slave" association people have - except for in the USA - is with the nomenclature used for IDE/SATA drive configuration in BIOS.
And that's in English alone. Other languages generally have their "master" equivalent disjoint from slavery or adjacent topics.
>Telling to others which word they might consider
Instead the pattern seems to be a group of people on Twitter/Mastadon/social media de jur all taking a quote and sharing talking about how awful it is that someone use the word "blah" in this day and age and how they are a horrible person and we should call up their work and get them fired...
Sometimes even completely misunderstanding what the person is talking about; as one of the first examples of this rousing to cancel people was a guy telling his friend that he would fork that code and someone misunderstood it to be sexual....followed by much ado about dongles.
could be, but...
most words are rooted in a notion of social dominance and only carry a a notion of social dominance when used in the context of expressing social dominance (to oppress or abuse of other people).
words like reign or empire or dictator are absolutely rooted in a notion of social dominance, but we accept that it's completely fine if we use them as a metaphor or as an hyperbole. If someone gets offended, it's their fault.
Some example:
- 2013 was the year in which the reign of Federer at the top of the men's game had supposedly come to an end
- Amazon empire: the rise and reign of Jeff Bezos
- Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, has been called a benevolent dictator for life
Most, I don’t know really, that would need a lot of statistics, but we can certainly agree that a significant portion of the vocabulary pertaining to social matter do.
>words like reign or empire or dictator are absolutely rooted in a notion of social dominance, but we accept that it's completely fine if we use them as a metaphor or as an hyperbole.
Yes, sure, when the context is appropriate, we totally agree. We might lake enough proper bandwidth with flat text alone to discuss that properly though. :D I’m confident it would be far easier to have a conversation on that topic topic around some drinks and laughs for example.
That said, in all example given here, the connection to the toxic social attitudes are obvious.
Every competition-focused sport is rooted in the parable of imposing one dominance on an other, carrying a supremacist perspective with it. That’s why for example yoga competitions will be controversial, while it tennis is not.
As for the two latter celebrities, they don’t really have a reputation of being paragons of empathy that we can point to and say "if everyone would act like this in its interpersonal relationships, humanity would live in gentle bliss and harmony." To be more precise, I don’t know them personally, this remark is really not about these individuals, but more on pointing that in these specific cases, the matching reputation doesn’t serve well the point of uses in metaphoric or hyperbolic ways.
Believe me.
You wanna know something funny?
The word used in Latin for betrayal (tradunt from which derives tradimento in Italian) at its origins meant "to give, transfer, deliver"
When the Christians came to be, they changed its meaning to something bad because Judas "gave Jesus away".
A simple innocent word has become the quintessence of being an awful person because of a stupid religious myth that also started one of the many persecutions of the Jews.
So beware of changing the meaning of words or advocating for their removal from the public discourse, you'll never know who's gonna be hurt by it.
> the connection to the toxic social attitudes are obvious
the only thing that is obvious is that they are only hyperboles, Amazon is not an Empire, Linus Torvalds is not a dictator and Federer did not actually reign over anything.
I would also argue that Linus has been seen as "benevolent" and I really wanna know from you where the connection to the toxic social attitudes lies when we talk about Federer's reign.
It's obvious to me that the sentence was referring to "the king of mens' tennis" (as a metaphor, do you know what they are?) to celebrate him and not to some literal evil ruler who should be dethroned, with the use of the force if necessary.
It’s not like it’s a call to act in any extreme way. Actually, the comment doesn’t even mention anything that one should do.
We can listen to other feelings and interpretations of our words even with zero etymological consideration at stake. But if we try to deny their feeling that some word is derogative and back our perspective on lexical neutrality, maybe we might double check we are not missing some well documented semantics of the word and its history.
That said, given the number of downvotes, it looks like I miss some contextual clues about what it might make it feels as some call to extremist POV.
engineer: interesting. what problems has it helped you solve
social engineer:
[0] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6828/was-the-ex...
It's correct to be anti-racist / anti-sexist / etc. but that doesn't come from just changing your language while still operating the same as before. It reminds me of the whole fuss over using "homeless" vs "unhoused" - while actual policies to help homeless people get ignored or defunded.
More than one thing happens at a time. I'm fairly certain the people urging us to change our metaphors are also the ones pushing for more substantive change.
I am ambivalent about these language change campaigns myself. On the one hand, you're asking for almost nothing of people other than the agree that they agree something is wrong. On the other, inevitably it results in an ugly, violent backlash which reveals that that which you thought was beyond the pale isn't. Everyone rushes to die on the hill you pointed out.
I have a similar feeling about people insisting that starfish and jellyfish be called sea stars and jellies, but here I think the moral argument lies entirely with the resisters. No one is confused that these radially symmetric things are fish. What, are we going to call cardinals redbirds now because they aren't actually clergymen?
But in the case of metaphors that belittle or bother someone, why not just change? It demands nothing of you but courtesy.
It really doesn't. The human brain is very adept at accepting renames for concepts and we are so accustomed to alternative references to the same thing that we take physical pleasure from wordplay and give nicknames to our favorite things.
It takes only a few tries to start learning a new name or reference to something for normal people.
Hell, give it a try! Take a completely meaningless or harmless term in your life and attempt to use a different word for it. Hell, there is a wonderful children's book about doing this called "Frindle".
I would go so far as to argue being able to liberally and arbitrarily adjust how we reference things is one of the key powers that makes language work, and one of the main ways it enhances our ability to work with concepts and logical systems. Language DOES affect the way we think.
If using a different word for something really does cause you significant cognitive load, consider seeing a psychologist because there might be something "abnormal" about your brain.
> goes on to describe significant cognitive load
You know, it’s fine as well, when there’s a point to it. In this case we have a fairly well written article giving some interesting context around cargo cults, but certainly nothing that contradicts the central idea around the metaphor, and no injured parties AFAICT. So that’s a no.
Consider how factory, mill, works and plant are all usable to refer to a place where some human endeavor is conducted. The term plant has several etymological hypothesis, including one linking it to slavery and colonization through plantations.[1]
https://shuncy.com/article/why-are-factories-called-plants-c...
I’m not a English native and I’m unaware of the "homeless" vs "unhoused" tensions. But to my mind they still seems same-minded compared to "indigent", "pauper", "sedentarized", "nomad" or "settler".
Like the difference between couchsurfing in a friend's house (homeless but not unhoused) and sleeping in a car or on the street (both homeless and unhoused).
I think the biggest problem comes when this type of language policing is the primary way of changing behaviors. Lack of adequate conflict resolution leads to dysfunction.
Clarified at the end of the post, i think a valid complaint is that the fictitious pop culture version (from which the technical use was derived) has unfortunately obscured the anthropologically correct version which is far darker and important.
> Finally, the cargo cult metaphor turns decades of harmful colonialism into a humorous anecdote. Feynman's description of cargo cults strips out the moral complexity: US soldiers show up with their cargo and planes, the indigenous residents amusingly misunderstand the situation, and everyone carries on. However, cargo cults really were a response to decades of colonial mistreatment, exploitation, and cultural destruction. Moreover, cargo cults were often harmful: expecting a bounty of cargo, villagers would throw away their money, kill their pigs, and stop tending their crops, resulting in famine. The pop-culture cargo cult erases the decades of colonial oppression, along with the cultural upheaval and deaths from World War II. Melanesians deserve to be more than the punch line in a cargo cult story.
I don't think it's possible to override the pop culture version, language does its own thing, but the author at least managed to inject a bit of important history back into it for many of us here, and that will probably make an interesting talking point as we are reminded of it each time we use it technically.
All the responses pushing back against this idiocy in this thread give me hope for the future, that we're regaining our collective sanity.
Critizize China, russia or isis and you might end up like those who actually fought in the resistance or some menshiwiki. Not recommended how that ended.
My native language is Ewe. The words we usually use for caucasian people is "yo vo".It's an evolution of an archaic pronunciation used today by only a few, "ye vu", and it was brought to my attention recently that it means "cunning dog".Ye=cunning, Vu=dog.
Explanation: we kinda didn't start on a good footing with the Germans back in the day ... So today most people will call every white person "cunning dog" without even knowing or meaning harm because the dialect has evolved. On one hand, for most people, it's just a random word with no insulting connotation; you try to make them switch to some another term, you're crazy dumb woke etc. On the other hand, I know I would take offense in being called that even if I'm told the word's lost the original meaning a long time ago.
Personally I don't know where the middle ground should be. But some "retroactive policing of language" is definitely needed. It may seem mundane to you, but sometimes these kind of things can be unsavory to other people. With globalization, it's not you and your pals anymore ...
In 50 years or so, people will just say the next round of terms is insensitive, especially as language continues to change and evolve, and repeat on forever.
You can "decimate" something without actually killing 1/10th of the people involved, and you can call some people "yo vo" without meaning they are cunning dogs.
If you had to group into Caucasoid, Negroid or Mongoloid your likely choose the first one, but I'd say it's better not to work on the basis of 18th century "racial theory".
However, I don't usually make a fuss about the term, because I know a great many people use the term to mean "white" and aren't thinking about the relative merits of the three races of man. It's just a word to many people and it serves well enough in that context.
Because that would seem an important thing to ascertain.
I don't want to condemn your thoughts/feelings on this as I'm clearly not familiar with the specific situation, but I think what people are getting at is that imagining that other people may be offended by words and then policing based on that seems like moral posturing and trying to change people's habits for very little reason. If you take into account that (for the most part) the users of those words/idioms don't actually mean the 'bad' meaning, it all seems ... pointless. An action to make an in-group feel superior to an out-group, but that doesn't actually make any difference.
It sometimes reminds me of the (very middle class) campaign that took place in the UK in the last decade to stop people feeding bread to ducks, swans and other waterfowl. Well meaning, virtuous people took to putting up home-made signs about it at popular spots, and to intervening and even shaming those that continued the centuries old tradition. Pictures of swans with wing conditions were often used to try to shock.
While there is truth to the idea that there are better things you can feed ducks (oats, leafy greens), eventually the royal master of swans and a well-respected professor of ornithology got together and put out a statement begging people not to stop. Bread does no detectable harm to the birds, there is no known link to the medical conditions and it forms an important source of calories for many populations over winter. But the signs and the behaviour don't really stop, because it gives some people a way to look down on others, to signal that they know and those other idiots are just awful.
On the one hand, someone might appreciate that you are demonstrating care for how much something might hurt for them to think about in a certain way.
On the other hand, someone might take it as an insult that you don't think they can handle thinking about that thing in that way.
Assuming either one without knowing your audience is easily folly, but the "recovery" from each is different.
Even your username is a ~Yiddish~ (edit: Hebrew, thank you, ars) word Jewish people use for non-Jewish people (sometimes derogatory, maybe). There's no end to this rabbit hole.
Judge people by their intentions behind what they say, not some etymological trivia.
Personally, I don't like the term from my language not only because of the possible reception but also it doesn't feel right to use it.
Also I'd only use it to say goodbye, only Italians use it to say hello, and you have to feel superior to someone!
Intent doesn't really matter here; it's just poor communication if you are aware of where the term comes from. Why not just use "dogmatic" or something?
Even "magical thinking" doesn't capture all that nuance.
I don't really see why this distinction is worth preserving. Dogma (i.e. arbitrary and not-rationally-based belief) seems to be the objectionable part here. Where the dogma originates seems less important.
I mean, yes, there is probably a more pressing cause, a worthier cause, a more effective way to bring about change if the guy cares about the issue of colonialism or something. So what? There's always a worthier or more pressing cause or arguably a better way to pursue it than [x].
If you care about something, that's your cause. You don't need to justify it by establishing that your commitment to it accurately reflects its place in the triaged hierarchy of capital-i issues.
It's also possible to care about more than one thing at a time.
So if this is the guy's cause, that's fine. He doesn't need to devote himself to something worthier or demonstrate that the energy he expends on it is well spent.
That being said, his criticism of the metaphor and his prescription both strike me as not just nonsense but backwards. Providing historical context shows, if anything, that "cargo cult" as a metaphor is historically accurate, especially in the sense in which engineers use it: cargo cult engineering practices are those that their believers are convinced will help usher in some desired future, but the basis of those practices is sheer superstition.
And the fact that there is a story, in the context of actual, historical cargo cults, to be told about exploitation or subjugation is, again, an irrelevant, empty truism. Almost every grass-roots religious movement can be interpreted this way. And in areas that were under colonial or authoritarian rule, one would be hard pressed to find social and religious movements that don't in one way or another respond to those conditions.
So the author's historical analysis is sophomoric, like the guy has just discovered oppression and really wants to raise the alarm about it. The resulting prescription is empty, lame, and tedious.
Sanctifying the oppressed this way is also weirdly tone deaf and condescending. Nobody's asking us to protect the subaltern religious movements of southeast Asia, nobody's belittling them, and nobody cares, except the author, apparently, who for some strange reason is filing complaints on their behalf.
In your opinion, exactly what's the cause in this case?
"It's time to abandon the cargo cult metaphor"
It’s ironic that the author themselves is cargo culting taking back language as an apologetic virtue signal.
“Don't you see that the whole aim of cancel culture is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it”
I'm sure there are 1000000 other things you could devote your time to than policing someone's blog-post language on HN.
The problem is that there is nothing being corrected at all. There's only a poorly framed and distorted interpretation of the coloquial use of an expression, which is then exaggerated to serve as a basis for virtue signaling.
The blogger goes to the extent of trying to dismiss any argument that ever refers to the concept as "simply a lazy, meaningless attack". As if anyone who refers to a specific concept is automatically wrong by means of commiting a foul in a virtue signaling game.
> 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. Moreover, both metaphors differ from the cargo-cult metaphor in other contexts, referring to the expectation of receiving valuables without working.
So there's some justification that the meaning has escaped the metaphor and has become meaningless.
Also, it's quite ironic that arguably the term "virtue signaling" has itself become a lazy, meaningless attack- a cargo cult, in other words. Claims of virtue signaling - both as a rhetorical activity, and as an insult devised to shut down discourse- are both cargo cults.
> (...) Feyman's cargo-cult science has no chance of working, while cargo-cult programming works but isn't understood.
Cargo-cult science does not work because by "work" it would need to involve causality, which it doesn't.
This is not the same as the cargo-cult mentality referred to in tech circles. That refers only to the belief that the performative aspect correlated to an expected outcome is actually the cause, whereas it's at best a correlation. People build landing strips expecting cargo planes to drop off riches. People use a specific project tree layout expecting the project to work. People use a programming language expecting their code to be memory safe and vulnerability-free. People use a container orchestration service expecting their system to be highly scalable and resilient. People use a framework expecting their system to be high performance and efficient.
You'll see claims that "this app runs on Kubernetes, thus is very resilient and highly scalable". Cargo cult mentality.
Do you understand why the "lazy, meaningless attack" remark makes absolutely no sense when actually considering the concept?
There is no justification. There's only a straw man based on, at best, a gross failure to understand the very basis of concept that's being criticized.
Not to mention that since "cargo cult engineering" badly misstates what cargo cults were, it's not even a good metaphor! You need to have two different definitions of "cargo cult": the real life one, and Feynman's childish fairy tale. Just say something else!
I will add that the frog thing is also a terrible metaphor! Since frogs don't actually behave this way, saying "these people are like frogs in a boiling pot" is tantamount to saying "these people are intelligent enough to leave when the situation gets bad." Again you have to use two different mental models: actual frogs, and a childish fairy tale. And note what happens if someone hasn't heard the boiling frogs thing: they are told the lie as if it were true. Just like with cargo cults - everyone hears Feynman first, and only later do a small segment learn that Feynman was wrong. These "metaphors" spread ignorance, and it's completely avoidable. We are grown adults and we can simply phrase our points in different ways. We don't have to rely on idiotic stories and lying to each other.
I'm not sure you and I even have the same understanding of the term., since I wouldn't have said it was equivalent to snake oil or alchemy. My interpretation is that it relates to trying to reproduce success by mimicking some (apparent) cause, while in fact not understanding the underlying mechanism, and hence failing.
If you distilled the Feynman story into something like this:
"There was a society inhabiting a remote island, who had little or no contact with the outside world. At some point a much larger and richer society sets up an airstrip on the island and gathers supplies. They share these supplies with the locals and due to the relative wealth disparity it is a significant improvement to their quality of life. The foreigners eventually leave and the supplies stop, and so the locals try to replicate the prior conditions. This makes sense, but since they have relatively little knowledge of aircraft or geopolitics the only information they have to work with is what they saw at the airstrip. Their efforts are doomed because they lack the requisite deeper understanding."
Now you and I know that this is a gross simplification and neglects a religious aspect, the anthropology-goggles of whoever reported the effects in the west, the many disparate groups that have been labelled "cargo cults" in recent history, the local economic and social conditions, etc. I think a reasonable person can understand that it's just a little fable inspired by genuine events, and that it serves to illustrate an idea. It shouldn't be used to make a judgement about the people involved or global conflict or human nature, except as a small piece taken with all the relevant historiographical context.
Stories like these are IMHO an effective way to spread and label ideas, so that if my PHB buys ping pong tables because he wants to have a share price like Google's then I can say "cargo cult" rather than explaining the whole concept, because I understand that my colleagues will know what I'm referring to.
I applaud your effort to stand up for people you feel are being unfairly maligned, but I think that you can use the metaphor without lying or promoting ignorance.
I think you're getting pushback for these reasons:
1. The times, they are a-changing. The title and conclusion of the article (whilst mild) are telling people not to use an otherwise useful phrase because it might be offensive to Micronesians.
2. Some of the conclusions seem on fragile ground honestly, despite how well researched they are. You start by claiming that Feynman misrepresented cargo cults because he watched a bad movie, but then give lots of examples of tribes doing the exact things he talked about. You even present photos of a "radio tower", mention a "radio" that was just a woman wrapped in wire and other such fake objects.
Feynmann's point was actually an important one about science, not Melanesian tribes. That was just a hook to get students to listen, just like how you used the famous physicist as a hook to get people to read your article. But I'm struggling to see where the inaccuracy is here. Given he spent only a few sentences on it, he did seem to correctly summarize what cargo cults are and the fact that some of them pre-date WW2 and talk about ships is really neither here nor there.
3. There is a strong overtone here of "European settlers were bad and wrong and cargo cults wouldn't exist if they hadn't turned up", which is unsupportable. These were people who started suffered a horrible prion disease because they engaged in cannibalism, something the nasty Europeans put a swift end to everywhere they took control. Their garbled belief systems about good stuff appearing when they get the rituals right weren't caused by Christianity, which is why they had to imagine that the Bibles they'd been given were incomplete to try and make it fit with their pre-existing ideas. In fact the Old Testament explicitly forbids exactly the kind of idolatry they were engaged in, leading to the interesting thought that maybe that rule evolved because it lends itself to self-destructive ritualism and cargo cult-like thinking. Christianity also forbids many other self-destructive ideas often found in isolated tribes, like human sacrifice and inter-tribal warring. If so it would seem like Christianity is the fix, not the cause.
4. The semantic drift in how people use the term seems small. Cargo cult programming doesn't work, that's the reason it's criticized. Given enough copy/pasting from Stack Overflow you might get something that superficially looks right, just like with enough work you can make an airport out of bamboo that looks right, but it won't actually meet its spec for functioning correctly because important stuff will be missing.
Whilst you certainly succeed in making the point that cargo cults were a more complex phenomenon than what Feynman presented in his brief intro, I didn't come away convinced that the metaphor is misused.
> Given enough copy/pasting from Stack Overflow you might get something that superficially looks right, just like with enough work you can make an airport out of bamboo that looks right, but it won't actually meet its spec for functioning correctly because important stuff will be missing.
There’s plenty of code that just works despite not meeting the spec, though. The allegation of cargo culting is levied against empty formalities that betray a misunderstanding of why something works or not. There are plenty of tales in software of “load-bearing code” and lines lost to faded tribal knowledge and even magic comments that are not to be removed because somehow they keep the end program functioning.
Virtue signaling is not driven by effectiveness but by the effort it takes for you to one-up people around you with a holier-than-thou attitude.
In fact, I would go as far as to argue that the point of virtue signaling is to be the least effective as possible, as to maximize the opportunities to one-up people and stand out.
Your side won. Is that not enough for you? What more do you want?
So, because of that I went and checked the definition. Merriam says:
> : the act or practice of conspicuously displaying one's awareness of and attentiveness to political issues, matters of social and racial justice, etc., especially instead of taking effective action
So I learned something today, that virtue signalling can refer to political issues. I guess on this side of the pond I was more used to it applying to social posturing.
Anyway, that being said, I do feel that the "two party" thing you guys have going there is leading to this increased polarisation and radicalisation, especially online. If you think someone using "virtue signalling" is "attacking your side", you're literally viewing them as "the enemy". "Your side won". That can't be healthy for you. There's a lot of nuance between "your side" and "their side".
Apparently, "they" will moan loudly about being silenced until everyone else has stopped saying things they don't like.
(using "they" as a vague, undefined term, after seeing such a widespread use of "we" in this thread).
Silenced requires a someone to take active steps to do the silencing. At best this is just people choosing to not listen. If you want the blue tribe jab it's got to be something like "they will keep trying to call everyone racists until people stop saying thing they don't like."
What kind of "evidence" beyond the content of the signalling itself it would require? I mean, sure one could make a detailed critique of the article to show why exactly it fits the term very well (TLDR version would be it tries to police the well-understood usage of the term that describes real phenomenon and is useful to prevent imaginary offenses) but it wouldn't be "evidence" - it does not introduce any new facts, only one's opinion. The only factual "evidence" necessary is the content of the article, which is already here.
> Is that not enough for you?
Not even beginning to be close to being enough. Winning would be going back to the times where you can discuss political topic without fear of your life being ruined and your livelihood being taken away from you. Winning would be where there aren't thousands of people actively searching to hurt other people for disagreeing with them. Winning would be not having dozens of people in a lot of corporations specifically paid obscene money for pushing idpol. Winning would be forgetting the meaning of the word "cancelled" that we learned in the last decade. Winning would be for the culture to change so that trying to hurt people for disagreeing would be shameful, not praised. We may have hope for it to happen one day, but we're not even close to being true now. It may take years or decades - just it it took decades for "woke nonsense" to take root in the culture - and may very well not happen at all, any election results nonwithstanding.
"Virtue signaling" means someone is acting only to signal their own virtue, and not because they actually believe in the thing they are doing or expressing.
There is no evidence of that.
[Emphasis altered -- CRC.]
Really? I never knew it had to be a necessary part of it, that they don't believe in [whatever]. Are you sure that's part of the general definition, and not just something you made up?
Even if you do believe in something, if you keep preening yourself in sanctimony about how virtuous you are for believing in it -- what is that, then, if not virtue signaling?
And "wokeism" aside, he gives a good obscure-history lesson as to why the phrase "cargo cult" doesn't actually mean what most of us think it does. That itself made it worth a read for me.
He personally may not. We do know though there are a lot of people very eager to wage such campaigns, and we know speech-policing campaigns have very real and very far reaching consequences sometimes. So the sensitivity to such things is heightened right now. And I am sure that if the "rambling on his personal blog" contained some things that are considered culturally unacceptable (something like Damore memo, for example), there would be a lot of people who would call not only for widespread discussion but for suppression and deplatforming of the person expressing it. I think this is extremely wrong approach, regardless of the content, but I think also this may be the reason why discussing this seriously is an appropriate reaction. To be clear, I do not call (and I am extremely opposed to) attacking the person writing it in any way. But I think it deserves the pushback - in the form of discussion and critique - that it is getting. Language policing and censorship is very real, very dangerous and should be discussed and pushed back against.
> he gives a good obscure-history lesson as to why the phrase "cargo cult" doesn't actually mean what most of us think it does.
I am not sure that's actually true. Most of us probably thinks cargo cult is a religions practice somewhere in the Pacific that mimics external looks of the logistical operations performed by Westerners on their islands to expect the results of coming of goods that the Westerners brought in (cargo), without understanding what caused the actual logistic processes to happen and how they work, just by magic means. Most of us would probably have the specific details wrong, but that's true for almost every area. The article provided very good plenty of details, very interesting - but with all the "akshually"-ing there, I don't think it has proven the main premise wrong. The information itself is very much appreciated, but I don't think the conclusion - which seems to be "you are all wrong and should stop using this term" - is warranted.
He's skipping Twitter and jumped straight to hectoring people, going to the extent of even casting blanket criticism on the points being made by anyone using the metaphor.
Did the author make this article compulsory?
Did the author force Hacker News to put this on the front page?
Did the author threaten to sack you if you didn't read, understand and comply with the article?
Freedom of speech means that you will see things that you disagree with. But to conflate seeing an article in a _pull_ model, ie a title that you have to click on as hectoring people seems a bit, well far.
Its not like its a twitter pile on, this seems like a well reasoned, researched article with sited sources. Even if you don't agree with the outcomes.
You might find them annoying, but these people "yelling at clouds" in their personal blogs are actually refreshing when all you see around are people leaning towards repeating the darkest part of our collective history.
I read the post as the author decribing facts and imparting instructions of what we should do ("It's time to do X", "The cargo cult metaphor should be avoided") because they believe their knowledge/opinions/morals/beliefs are better than mine, and somehow they can dictate what to do; how should I feel, what should I think.
Otherwise I am oppressing, contributing to oppress, perpetuating something, [insert other accusations].
As in the past 15 years. It's enough already.
The real question is why the author is doing this? Is it ego? Money? Clicks? Pure and true altruism?
And here "virtue signalling" comes as a possible valid answer too.
The problem with saying it's virtue signaling is that when you resort to ad hominem attacks, you're conceding the argument. Attacking character concedes the argument being made. Well I don't concede. I have a good argument against it. My argument is that nobody cares about the etymology or morality of a word. They care about its meaning and context. People don't learn language by reading etymologies. Nobody cares one way or the other about the morality of the first person who said it or popularized it especially if it happened a hundred years ago. We don't need to look up the etymology of every word or phrase before using it, and asking people to do that is unrealistic and unreasonable.
Is it virtue signaling? I don't know, and I don't care. His character doesn't matter to me. It doesn't affect whether or not his idea is a good one. It's a bad idea, and leave it there.
And doesn't matter if it was written in a blog.
Pablo Escobar could say that he understand his values (whatever they were; maybe money and power over all other values?) and that he works to apply them every day. He advocated for his own values and morals (ruthlessly). This doesn't make him an Ethical person.
And more to the point, you're not believable. Are you really going to say that because Pablo Escobar may have had a set of values and acted on those values, we have to throw away that whole idea?
Hitler was really fond of his pet dog, does having a pet dog make someone evil?
In any case, here's what I dislike about your original comment, and what it seems to express.
Instead of engaging with the ideas and values presented in the article, you feel back on attacking the very idea of expressing ideas and values. You know that's a ridiculous position, I know you do, but it's easier to do that than it is to actually engage.
Depends. Have you heard of the terms or phrases "preachy"? "Holier-than-thou"? "Pearl-clutching"? "Making mountains out of molehills"? "Language police"? "White knighting"? "Misapplied effort"? "Professionally offended"?
Are those positive?
And who gets to decide what's "bad behavior" and what's merely use of an old term? Based on what? Their feelings that use of the term offends someone from some group that they themselves don't belong to and have probably never even talked to IRL? That it's use implies some intend? That certain practices of some groups can't be referenced as a name, if those groups have had a sorry past? That the only ethnic people who use such terms are just the ex-opressors of said group, and not also people who have been themselves colonized or opressed? Does he think e.g. Jewish or Latin American or African developers don't use such terms too to describe the notion?
L-1) There's a purely informational layer, where he's talking about the meaning and history of the phrase "cargo cult."
L-2) There's an logical layer, where he attempts to use the information presented to persuade the reader to (not) modify their beliefs, feelings, or actions in some way.
L-3) There's an attitude layer, which involves the way he addresses the reader, his "virtue signaling," the quality of his writing, his overall tone.
(In another situation I might also consider:
L-4) The presentation layer, which involves the look of the website, its responsiveness, etc.)
In my opinion generally information should be most important, and then we look at the logic, and last but least consider the attitude. But I feel like increasingly in society we look at the attitude and if it turns us off, we summarily discard the entire thing, or even take an opposing view on principle. Even if the information and logic is sound. Hence the bulk of the comments here dismissing what he's saying out of hand because essentially it's too woke.
So my answer is that even conceding that the things you mention ("preachy" "holier-than-thou" etc.) are negative, ideally we ought to be able to critique just that layer without discarding the rest of the communication.
EDIT: Responding to your edit, I think he has no more or less right to decide what's good or bad than anyone else. Just because he's saying we ought to reject the phrase doesn't mean we have to actually do it, so I don't feel personally offended or enraged by his exhortation.
So, it makes sense that the thing the author prioritizes and focuses on will be criticized. Would many be criticizing a historical article on the origins of the term, or the plights of the people it covers?
Collective consensus.
But that doesn't mean the author is not entitled to have an opinion and express it.
The commenters who dislike the general tone are of course entitled to express that, however, it is baffling to me that the argument is that Author is entitled to their opinion and the commenters who disagree should not comment.
>> And who gets to decide what's "bad behavior" >Collective consensus.
I know this is generally the way of things however, I dislike this as it is mob rule.
In the same way that I hate K8s networking.
For example: "spook" was allegedly used at some point as a slur against black people, so if you have ever used the term "spooky" in a Hallowe'en context you have committed the immortal sin of doing a structural racism.
To the underemployed university administrative staff who have never experienced real hardships, this sort of thing is a Big Deal(tm), except we can't call it that because it's insensitive to short people. Correction: people experiencing heightlessness.
To this, I call out the case of the words Spanish speakers have been using to refer to disabled persons.
The word for "disabled person" was at a point in time deemed too insensitive and an outright insult, so around the 1970s the word "subnormal" started showing up even in government acts to appease the virtue signaling crowd.
Except that after a few years the word "subnormal" also managed to find itself as a prime example of a gross PC violation, and therefore they coined the term "minusválido" (i.e., "less than valid", a milder form of "invalid") to appease the PC gods.
But lo and behold, "minusválido" is now also looked poorly by the PC crowd as being offensive.
https://languageacts.org/loaded-meanings/schools-teachers/ri...
How à propos, because in English "disabled" is no longer acceptable and they now demand that you say "differently-abled".
I mean hell it's not even a less accurate description, you're not able to walk but you're able to move around using crutches or a wheelchair or other mobility device. A person who isn't able to walk may still be able to do almost everything day to day (well aside from walking) that a non-disabled (or non-differently abled person, ok that sounds kinda weird) person would be able to, albeit in a different way.
These are the same people who publish "inclusive language guides" with garbage like "don't use the term Brainwave because it's dehumanizing to people with intellectual disabilities".
It's an entire R&D field dedicated to finding new and creative ways to be offended.
It feels… inconsequential.
Non constructive noise from creatures with desire only to chase something.
> It seems like you'ld have to have access to their mental state, no
Of course, absent communication, that would be the only way. Fortunately, communication - such as written text - allows us to let others to witness certain aspects of our mental state, this is one of the points of communication. So, present the communication, we can make certain conclusions about the mental state of the communicator.
The signaling is just pointing it out to make yourself look better, it doesn’t mean you’re lying.
In reality: people have opinions, and they can be different. That's fine.
The number of upvotes (and, presumably, vouches) for the article suggest that you’re in a bubble.
Instead of getting offended, consider this an opportunity to be intellectually curious and learn some interesting history.
False dilemma. No one who ever mentioned the term "cargo cult" is endorsing oppression or promoting rapists, corruption, racists, or any nonsense of this sort.
In fact, your comment reads a lot like a thinly veiled blanked and baseless accusation on anyone who disagrees with a silly hypothesis.
The concept has a very specific meaning in tech circles. No one who uses it is even holding in mind anything related to Melanesia. You can waste as much time as you'd like on virtue signaling by championing a "master-slave vs leader-follower" rebranding, but it's a matter of time before someone out-virtues you and figures out how to frame your own PC term as oppressive. It's exhausting.
> No one who ever mentioned the term "cargo cult" is endorsing oppression or promoting rapists, corruption, racists, or any nonsense of this sort.
doesn't work, as you don't have sources for that.
> No one who uses it is even holding in mind anything related to Melanesia.
Which is the whole point of the article, to give you background.
In the same way that some newspapers have listed "rawdogging" as one of their words of the year, saying "oh its ok you can use this" but neatly forgets to mention what the word _still_ means to a sizeable number of people.
> figures out how to frame your own PC term as oppressive. It's exhausting.
Come on. oppressive? The entire world of corporations is oppressive. You need to conform to not be fired. The "In" words change all the time. The list of banned phrases changes monthly. thats normally down to the whims of just a small bunch of people in the c-suite. If you transgress, you're yeeted out.
That is oppression, not voluntarily reading article that makes you sad.
Stuff like that is exactly what's so dangerous with virtue signaling: It leads to conflating tiny, or possibly non-existent, infractions with serious evil. I'm sure you didn't mean to say people who talk about "cargo cult programming" are corrupt racists and rapists, did you? Or that they promote corruption, racism, and rape?
Maybe you should have tried to find a way to express yourself that didn't make it sound quite so much like that was what you were saying. Or, you know, if this virtue-signaling article didn't exist, this discussion wouldn't exist either, and then you wouldn't have said it.
Anyone promoting Bill Cosby the person is definitely doing something questionable, which is the relevant point.
I'm bringing up Ford and Gandhi because I think they're generally considered respectable, but could be accused of being in the category of those to "shun" based on verbal statements or opinions. I am not aware that either did anything. Are we shunning people because they've advocated opinions that in their time weren't controversial, but are now?
Bill Cosby's conviction was overturned on a technicality. Do we shun him even if the courts couldn't/didn't convict him?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/why-bill-cosbys-conviction...
Or similarly, "unconvicted" but alleged unsavory characters, perhaps pop musicians, TV hosts, presidents, presidential candidates, and so on.
Do you just shun everyone who has simply been accused of misconduct? What if the accusers recant or are found to be lying? It's happened.
Crystal Mangum, now incarcerated for murder, has recanted her rape accusation against the Duke la crosse players:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/woman-falsely-accused-duke-lacros...
> Bill Cosby's conviction was overturned on a technicality. Do we shun him even if the courts couldn't/didn't convict him?
Yes, the public is well entitled to shun him on the basis of what he did indeed confess to .. that is entirely orthogonal to that confession being rejected on a technicality and thus not being part of a formal legal conviction.
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/07/us/bill-cosby-quaaludes-s...
So he appears to have confessed at least to be a drug dealer.
With Cosby's testimony included he was convicted, it and the womens testimonies were found to be sufficient under law to demonstrate guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
When the testimony was excluded on technical grounds the statements by Cosby weren't demonstrated to be false or questioned in any way, they were simply set aside, as true as they ever were.
Again, the general public is entitled to shun Cosby on the basis of the testimonies presented including his own words which haven't been discredited, just excluded.
But my point is not the minutiae of Cosby's trial, but that he is "unconvicted" - and if you want to claim to not encourage rapists/murderers/the corrupt are we talking about:
1. THE CONVICTED: people who have been convicted of these felonious crimes (e.g. Stewart, Tyson, ),
2. THE UNCONVICTED: unconvicted people who have made statements relating to these crimes, which may not even be crimes in their country or era (Cosby, Ford, Gandhi), or
3. THE ACCUSED: people who have simply been accused of these crimes (i.e. #metoo or other public accusations with no conviction and public denials, Woody Allen, Sam Altman, etc)
Made his fortune from punching people in the head, so that is such a weird example of a person that you are expecting others to empathise with or support. A whole lot of people find sports that result in brain injuries to be pretty distasteful.
That people choose to find it distasteful is fine with me.
I'm talking about Mike Tyson, the convicted rapist, not Mike Tyson as a boxer.
Just a reminder to never talk to the FBI without a lawyer
Hmmm
"The grand jury returned an indictment on June 4, 2003, charging Stewart with conspiracy, obstruction of justice, making false statements, and securities fraud." https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/...
I think she beat "securities fraud", but was convicted on conspiracy, obstruction, and making false statements:
https://web.archive.org/web/20040307121033/https://money.cnn...
So, yeah, technically she didn't get convicted of insider trading/securities fraud, but managed a felony conviction around the charges.
Good catch. So I guess we can't easily dismiss Martha from our category of people we refuse to promote.
My rule of thumb is that anyone who talks about decolonization is a grifter. The specific harms of colonialism are real; decolonial thinking is for those without anything worthwhile to say.
"We should avoid criticizing people's speech."
Note that both of these statements are criticisms of people's speech.
Part of me wonders about master vs main and if anyone was actually offended by the term.
Or did a small group of people get offended on the behalf of others?
After all, there was plenty of disagreement before these changes; it isn't like a DEI or ESG policy existing somehow made everyone think equity or the environment mattered and now a switch is thrown the other way.
I actually think these kinds of things cause the counterculture to get stronger - ESG is a great example where lots of people got really mad about the idea that some people want to invest their money in ways that consider harm to the world as a criteria alongside profit.
In theory if you disagreed with esg as an investment strategy (either in principle or in how folks measure it) it would be great to see out there; what an easy way to out perform those following it. In practice it actually made people livid and there is a ton of pushback against and even perceived harm from people with that strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_(politics)#Controll...
My point is similar to other high-ranked points on this thread, I just didn't feel like gussying it up.
It's gonna be OKAY. It's OKAY to subtly adjust your language towards better ends, if it makes people feel more comfortable and creates a more equitable environment around you. The world won't implode. Although truly strained to the core of my being I have found the willpower to stop using "chinese whispers", preferring "game of telephone", stopped using "guys", preferring "y'all" and started to prefer generic "they/them" until I know the person's pronouns.
Amongst all the slings and arrows of life suffered, let this tiny ask be not one of them.
This is still, by the way, how it's seen by many "educated" and "well meaning" people who would talk about appropriation if it came in other context.
So, I guess my question is, when will you stop using y'all, as it makes me feel uncomfortable?
Who is being made to feel more comfortable? I think what's missing here is any evidence of harm or even minor discomfort.
It's not OK to demand I take on the cognitive load of changing my speech for no particular reason, or to shame me for not taking it on.
It’s nice to be educated about common misconceptions and potentially hurtful language, but unfortunately society doesn’t have enough slack right now to be a sufficiently chill about it and not devolve into tribal bullshit over it. At least that’s the concern.
I don’t think that the post really supports that idea at all. It was incomplete, perhaps, but does not sound inaccurate.
The basic premise of Feynman's interpretation is that cargo cults arose from post-war magical thinking by native Melanesians. TFA observes that (1) cargo cults predate the war, (2) are connected to a broader millenarian phenomena, and (3) don't involve magical thinking about the cargo per se but come from a pre-existing set of religious beliefs (pre-existing spirits/gods that would take cargo from foreigners and dispense it to the locals).
What makes "cargo cult" appealing as a technical is the fact that it's exotic (to the post's point about colonialism), not that the underlying phenomenon is particularly special. Substitute "cargo cult" with "Eucharist" and this becomes clear.