Marginalium

Feynman’s ‘cargo cult’ metaphor for science has a far more interesting history than I learned in class, and as this article concludes:

The cargo cult metaphor should be avoided for three reasons. First, the metaphor is essentially meaningless and heavily overused … Feynman’s cargo-cult science has no chance of working, while cargo-cult programming works but isn’t understood … “cargo cult” can be applied to anything: agile programming, artificial intelligence, cleaning your desk. Go, hatred of Perl, key rotation, layoffs, MBA programs, microservices, new drugs, quantum computing, static linking, test-driven development … At this point, cargo cult is simply a lazy, meaningless attack.

The second problem with “cargo cult” is that the pop-culture description of cargo cults is historically inaccurate. Actual cargo cults are much more complex and include a much wider (and stranger) variety of behaviors …

Feynman’s description of cargo cults strips out the moral complexity … Melanesians deserve to be more than the punch line in a cargo cult story.