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'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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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: 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.
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.
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".
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...
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.
Where, where?
"Hear, hear!" HTH.
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.