13 ms·

Cargo Cult Science (1974) [pdf]

230 points by _cnhi 3y ago

nntwozz 3y ago
In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. 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—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
throw18376 3y ago
I have heard that some anthropologists now have a more complicated view of the cargo cults. They argue that, even if there was some notion of making cargo appear, their main purpose was more political and social. It was an opportunity for the locals to move around in organized groups, even march around doing military drills, without causing the colonial leadership to panic and retaliate. It would bind people together socially and get them used to coordinating under a leader, whose legitimacy would be enhanced. Sometimes people now claim that "cargo cult science" is not really a good analogy and should be abandoned. However, I think this newer understanding of cargo cults may actually make it an even better analogy. Even if a line of scientific ideas is mostly fake and its research practices can't possibly lead to truth, participating in this ritual of fake research, giving talks about it, and other science-shaped activities, still does bind the participants together. It lends prestige to the leaders of the field. It gives everyone a way to coordinate politically around securing funding and legitimacy from higher powers for their fake research area. And we've seen you really can keep a field going this way for a very long time even if the planes never land.
- Drakim 3y ago
  That is a very interesting view, thank you for sharing it. I've often used "cargo cults" as a way to categorize stupid ritualistic things about the world I didn't like, but it's good to be reminded that the world isn't so two dimensional.
  - tuyiown 3y ago
    This is a problem with the cargo cult analogy, the observer assumes to be an outsider, while it would be more useful to the observer to assume of being part of it.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      It is very difficult to be a part of a different group. Even if you move there it would often take years to become a member, if you ever can get that much trust. The idea is sound, but don't assume you understand the members enough to do a good job.
      - vitiral 3y ago
        I think they meant you should assume that YOU are part of a cargo cult. You should look for ways your own viewpoints/society/etc are cargo-cultish
        prox 3y ago
        Like Feynman says “The first principle is not to fool yourself, and you are the easiest to fool.”
        mistermann 3y ago
        Case in point: >> I think a better example of a cargo cult than bad science is climate change denial. The followers see the potential loss of "cargo" in the form of their current way of life as a problem and the leaders apply the skills that brought them success in politics to that problem. Someone good at reading legal documents is going to think that there is something wrong with scientific papers. Specifically: "The followers see..." - it is not known what climate change "deniers" believe - rather, people tell each other stories about what they believe, and believe these stories to be true. Some humans are currently smart enough to realize that this behavior is flawed in certain scenarios (race/gender/etc stereotypes), but when it comes to ~political stereotyping the mind (and mainstream "right thinking" culture/media/etc) will defend the delusional practice to the death. Typically these topic are argued primarily using memes (Gish Gallop, Whataboutism, Brandolini's Law, etc) and rhetoric (rendering it not possible for a strict logical perspective to "win"), with some stats and studies included to give the appearance of objectivity, permanently locking humans into this ~conceptual Overton Window. If humans could analyze and evaluate the system we are embedded in with the same emotional/psychological detachment we analyze computer systems with it would be a big improvement, but I do not see it happening anytime soon.
lpolovets 3y ago
I love this speech every time that I read it. There are a ton of examples of cargo cult thinking in the startup ecosystem. I wrote a post about this a few years back: https://www.codingvc.com/p/startup-cargo-cults-what-they-are-and-how-to-avoid-them https://www.codingvc.com/p/startup-cargo-cults-what-they-are... A few examples that come to mind: * because lots of famous VCs made contrarian bets, new VCs try to be contrarian (even when a consensus point of view is clearly correct). * almost every startup I know is looking for 10x engineers, even though most startups don't need 10x engineers. We've just all been conditioned to believe that 10x engineers are required to build a great company. * generalizing the 10x example, young startups copy the traits of FAANG companies or famously successful startups, even if those traits are harmful for early stage companies. Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool." Also, here's a text version of the OP that's easier to read on mobile: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
- amelius 3y ago
  Apple comes close to having started a cargo cult. People think that if they keep saying nice things about Apple, they will not one day lock them down hard.
  - EarthLaunch 3y ago
    People aren't saying nice things about Apple to appease Apple from locking things down. People who rebelliously use non-Apple products are helping to keep the alternatives alive. It's a tradeoff of now vs future. That's the real tradeoff, it's not cults. (edits: HN vs who?)
  - Drakim 3y ago
    It's more complicated than that, a lot of the people who says that Apple keeps things secure and tight compared to Android's wild west will themselves have a jail-broken iPhone. The iPhone was hot when it came out, and was a lot of people's first taste of the smartphone, and it's very easy to fall into tribalism. You and I aren't immune to it, there are hundreds of things we are irrational about in our lives. Arguments in favor of your chosen tribe are proxy arguments for preserving your own value, identity, and dignity.
obscurette 3y ago
Probably even more relevant in HN – https://stevemcconnell.com/articles/cargo-cult-software-engineering/ https://stevemcconnell.com/articles/cargo-cult-software-engi...
- hliyan 3y ago
  I wrote something similar in 2021: https://medium.com/the-engineering-manager-guide/cargo-cult-programming-is-killing-the-sri-lankan-software-industry-e5e9fc9a3ff9 https://medium.com/the-engineering-manager-guide/cargo-cult-...
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
James Knochel, 6/18/2022: "20th Century psychiatrists wrote manuals and procedures for the diagnosis of ‘mental disorders’. They order lab tests and undertake careful study of their patients’ symptoms, and they diagnose the conditions listed in their manuals. They seek regulatory approval of prescriptions to treat the diagnoses. They stopped doing psycho-surgery by mid-century, but still electrocute their patients’ brains when they think the patient will benefit. They have their own special hospitals, where troubled patients are sent to be stabilized on palliative prescription drugs. The psych wards have little areas for staff to sit in. The staff wear scrubs and badges, keep medical records, and some prescribe prescriptions—[s]he’s the doctor—and they wait for their patients to get better. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looks in the other medical specialties. But it doesn’t work. No patient recovers as a result of the allopathic drugs provided. Some patients get better anyways—perhaps because they’re fed, perhaps because they’re kept sober—compounding the profession’s confusion." It's true. People get better in psychiatric incarceration, because there is a predictable, regular daily schedule. There are meals on schedule. There are groups and stuff. You see the same people all the time. You're off TV and you're off the computer, so you need to face reality. You're relieved of burdens such as bill paying, cooking, cleaning, and running your household. You might color by the numbers or work a puzzle, but you've got reality, and it's stripped down and reduced to its essential components. You tend to get better and saner in this environment, if that's your baseline and that's where you tend to go. If your baseline is insanity, then all this regularity may not help.
- Daub 3y ago
  > the form [of their science] is perfect. The reason the British Houses of Parliament feature so many exterior and interior chimneys was to funnel so-called 'bad air' of the Thames away from the people who work inside the building. This was based on the newly acquired knowledge that some diseases are passed on via microbes. They wrongly assumed that most malicious microbes were airborne and that bad smells were an indication of their presence. The history of science is littered with such examples of 'good science/wrong conclusion'. We would be foolish to assume that this is not as true today as 100 years ago.
hellothere1337 3y ago
Cargo culting is one of those mental models that appears everywhere once you learn about it. Similar to kayfabe in wrestling and politics. 99.9% of humanity basically is winging it daily (by copying the shallowest parts of whatever philosophy/ideology they espouse) pretending they know everything while the 0.01% is honest with themselves and thus are free to question and doubt their own ideas in order to improve them. This 0.1% is mostly invisible despite pushing humanity forward
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  Wait, did you just wing those percentages?
  - tomcam 3y ago
    76.7% of Hacker News readers believe so
- josephg 3y ago
  I assume you place yourself in that 0.1%? Or was it 0.01%? Personally, I think we're all winging it almost every moment of our lives. Relative to domain experts, I'm bad at almost everything I do. (Cooking, driving, talking, writing, planning, etc). I'm only really good at maybe 2 or 3 things. I think we're all like this. And its fundamentally ok. Its how human brains are wired. Sometimes I imagine dividing all my thoughts between things I've personally invented and things I've heard from others. Whats the ratio? I think at least 95% of my thoughts come from other people. Maybe 99%. Maybe more.
  - hellothere1337 3y ago
    Nah I'm pretty stupid and follow the herd, its the reason for my success too!
  - bagacrap 3y ago
    How could you even tell if you've personally invented something? You don't know what caused a thought to pop into your head. Heck I often forget things I've said, so I clearly forget things I've heard. I could be fully convinced an idea was my own and still be dead wrong. Luckily you can build on the ideas of others without being a cargo cultist. Simply verify the sturdiness of the foundation before you go adding an extra wing to the house.
fsh 3y ago
My current favorite cargo cult is the quantum computing scene. No practical quantum computer exists, and nobody has a realistic concept for building one. Yet, there are dozens of startups and research groups developing quantum algorithms, quantum cloud computing solutions, etc. They seem to believe that blindly copying what silicon valley did must surely lead to success. What they are missing (or are refusing to accept) is that silicon valley was only successful because they had useful computers from the very beginning. In Germany, the cargo cult was even enshrined in the names of two research clusters ("Munich Quantum Valley" and "Quantum Valley Lower Saxony").
- ascar 3y ago
  > No practical quantum computer exists, and nobody has a realistic concept for building one. Can you expand on that? I'm not involved in the field, but there certainly exist many low qbit machines with varying technologies around the world that can already be used for calculations. Yes, they're nowhere near big enough to be useful yet, but qbit counts in the biggest machines are multiplying every year similar to Moore's law, so that seems to be just a matter of time.
  - Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago
    > qbit counts in the biggest machines are multiplying every year similar to Moore's law, so that seems to be just a matter of time. That's pretty much my take on it too, just because it's pretty limited right now there appears to be healthy growth in qbit counts which would suggest a more usable quantum computer is mostly a matter of time and further research.
    - upofadown 3y ago
      It doesn't matter how many qubits you have if those qubits are too noisy to do anything with. Noise is the ultimate limit when trying to get a useful signal out of something. Noise is how the universe stops us from knowing everything about everything.
  - fastneutron 3y ago
sfpotter 3y ago
People on HN love this article. I think it's because people on HN have a self-flattering view of themselves and their intelligence. The irony is that HN is itself a cargo cult.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  To be fair it's also Feynman. He's always entertaining.
- tomcam 3y ago
  Most people overestimate their intelligence, HNers or not. There’s even a name for it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8883889/#:~:text=People's%20perceptions%20of%20their%20intelligence,On%20average%2C%20people%20overestimate%20themselves https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8883889/#:~:tex....
lloeki 3y ago
I was looking for any kind of recording of Feynman's address, all I could find is a third party narrated version, which probably lacks Feynman's unique delivery: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yvfAtIJbatg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yvfAtIJbatg
- bagacrap 3y ago
  Can't AI fix this problem yet
sturza 3y ago
> It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. Feels appropriate to the current LK99 discussions
gadders 3y ago
I saw some archive footage of him speaking recently and I loved that he kept his blue collar (to my British ears) Brooklyn accent.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  It is kind of funny to me. I'm not sure he could help it though, ha ha.
henrydark 3y ago
I hope this isn't received too badly on HN, but Feynman was way too smug sometimes. This speech is essentially a philosophy of science piece, at the intellectual stage of at least one hundred years prior, and probably more like three hundred. It's too bad that he so diminished philosophy of science, and at the same time put so much undeveloped thought and prose into it.
- mandmandam 3y ago
  I'll bite. > way too smug sometimes Immediately after: > This speech is essentially a philosophy of science piece, at the intellectual stage of at least one hundred years prior, and probably more like three hundred. Bruh. Apart from the hypocrisy there, the fact is Feynman did science. He did more science than Popper, Kuhn, and Hume put together. He understood it on a level deeper than >99% of other scientists, and >99.9% of philosophers. That he did so with a "three hundred year" out of date view doesn't really reflect well on PoS's utility for actual scientists. Let people who are that capable and accomplished have a blind spot once in a while. What is this trend of cutting legend's ankles gonna accomplish for anybody.
  - bonoboTP 3y ago
    It's a weird beef between science and philosophy. It doesn't really make all that much sense. Philosophers arent on one team versus the scientists. If you read any philosopher, they'll vehemently contradict other (prior or contemporary) philosophers, passionately arguing for their view of things. Its a sort of elitism and inferiority complex. The fact that Feynman was working through some "naive" positivist worldview and yet achieved such success just rubs it in more that a talented scientist needs philosophers about as much as a bird needs ornithologists to know how to build its nest. When talent, curiosity and integrity come together in this way, it doesn't need some philosophers musings and rulebooks to do great.
    - mistermann 3y ago
      > The fact that Feynman was working through some "naive" positivist worldview and yet achieved such success just rubs it in more that a talented scientist needs philosophers about as much as a bird needs ornithologists to know how to build its nest. How's that global warming thing coming along? Let me guess: it isn't relevant?
uwagar 3y ago
it could be the tribals were critiquing how american military conducts itself in tropical lands.
bschne 3y ago
I read this extension of the concept a while back that dives a bit more into what's actually missing in the "cargo cult" approach, and how to transition to actual productivity — https://metarationality.com/upgrade-your-cargo-cult#upgrading https://metarationality.com/upgrade-your-cargo-cult#upgradin...
fnord77 3y ago
crypto seems like a massive cargo cult
- bagacrap 3y ago
  I would have just called it a regular cult ("give me all your money and you'll receive great riches in return"). It's true that adherents to crypto have a faulty understanding of traditional finance just as the islanders have a faulty understanding of airplanes and canned food. But rather than painstakingly recreating the minute details of traditional finance in hopes of capturing the same success, crypto cults go out of their way to avoid recreating those details or understanding why they're necessary, if burdensome.
swayvil 3y ago
Isn't "cargo-cult-science" simply "engineering"? You use the models handed down by the researchers because they work. They help you make machines and navigate reality and such. There's nothing shameful in that. You don't have the time for research. Time is money after all. You are not a scientist. You are not interested in Truth. You just want to get from A to B.
- bagacrap 3y ago
  Yes, Stack Overflow is also cargo cult programming. Of course sometimes you have to use tools handed to you by others and sometimes you won't understand how they work (I don't know how CPUs work but it hasn't stopped me from programming). This speech is largely about how you shouldn't willfully delude yourself. I think we've all had that situation where we're hunting down a bug and rearranging the code just so seems to resolve it, but we don't understand why. At a certain point the temptation is high to shrug your shoulders and move on even without fully understanding the mechanics of the fix. But if you do that, it will likely come back to bite you/someone one day. In the case of science it's even worse than engineering because the entire point of the endeavor should be to advance understanding, rather than to get certain results.
- Sharlin 3y ago
  No. A cargo cult is about doing X, or more commonly some flawed facsimile of X, in order to attain some desirable Y, because you've seen someone else do X and indeed attaining Y. What you don't know, however, that Y is not directly caused by X but there exists some W that's the cause of both X and Y. Now, "Y after X thus Y caused by X" (see: post hoc ergo propter hoc) is a perfectly fine hypothesis worth testing, but to keep doing that even if it doesn't work? That's the "cult" part. What Feynman criticized were certain fields of study, which in his opinion claimed to apply the scientific method to get scientific results (and importantly the associated prestige of Doing Science), but which in his view only practiced a facsimile of the scientific method and got merely facsimiles of scientific results! Now, cargo cult engineering definitely also exists. If you do X – even without entirely understanding why – and reliably get the wanted result Y, that's engineering. If you don't get exactly Y but are able to adjust X to compensate, that's also engineering. But if you keep doing X without understanding why and keep not getting the wanted result Y (even though you might get some different result Z and misinterpret it as Y), that's cargo cult engineering!
inquirerGeneral 3y ago
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rossdavidh 3y ago
One point rarely mentioned in regards to Cargo Cultism, is that the fundamental error of the cargo cultists wasn't that they didn't understand what made the planes land. The fundamental error was that they kept doing it, even though it wasn't working. We don't know how a lot of our most effective pharmaceuticals work, but we at least know to stop using them if (in a rigorous test) they don't work (although people with $$ in their eyes sometimes try to get us to do it anyway). Now, the magnitude of the error would depend on how long the cargo cultists kept doing this, even though the planes didn't return, and I have never heard how long that was. If they tried this for a month or two, it's not that bad an error, really; it was worth a try, based on what they knew. If they did this for decades, that would be a serious error.
- themodelplumber 3y ago
  > kept doing it, even though it wasn't working It was working though. It was maintaining a new state of social order, which is a mandate for sustainable power transfer in society.
- Sharlin 3y ago
  > If they did this for decades, that would be a serious error. Assuming they didn't get other benefits from the rituals, namely the same ones people get from more mainstream religions like social cohesion and a sense of purpose and a belief in some greater power.
- gremlinunderway 3y ago
  Except the cargo cult religions weren't trying to get cargo to return in any meaningful sense. It was a religious ritual like anyother. If we were watching Christian practices from the outside and not knowing any of the nuances of their beliefs we would probably interpret that "they're trying to get this guy named Jesus to return by eating crackers and wine". Feynman's speech is interesting and all but like so many similar gifted scientists who then go on to explore into other domains, they stumble into a field and ignore whole bodies of research into the philosophy and sociology of how science is produced. Thomas Kuhn had already established some solid insight into the social and organizational aspects of "scientific revolution", and showed that despite most people's ardent belief that science is somehow immune to it, there is a significant amount of social hierarchies and ritualistic beliefs that dictate what is considered "acceptable" science. Believing in science as this perfect immutable meritocracy is pretty much its own ritualistic cult, as if you can just pretend away human bias and insular beliefs by thinking really-really hard.
bonoboTP 3y ago
I'm only really familiar with machine learning and computer vision papers and many of the mentioned aspects, especially Mr. Young's rat running experiments have their analogs here. There is a ton of accumulated "dark knowledge" locked up in research groups, all the tricks (like putting the rat corridor on sand, in that example) but they are not really publishable. To publish, you need a clear story, literally that's the word we use when drafting papers. What's your story? A bunch of boring tricks rarely make a good story. And when people do publish such things, they have to also insert some other conceptual "novelty" contribution (typically a non intuitive tweak of the model architecture) to the paper that makes a +0.5% improvement on some benchmark, just to be able to talk about the real practical but ugly things that really make the whole thing work. Not to mention the replications that Feynman mentions, ie that before you test your tweaked new model, you have to also perform the baseline yourself, you can't just take it as given in another person's paper. This is rarely done in ML, and not just for resource scarcity reasons. Another reason is that it's damn hard. ML systems are very very complex and essentially impossible to exactly reproduce from a paper description. It would even be hard for the same team to do it, if we deleted their codebase and checkpoints and asked them to redo it. "But open source!" you say. Sure, except that large systems often evolve and the released code is often a refactored version of a haphazard ducktaped spaghetti monster codebase that was actually used, where they manually edited code files between runs, or hard-coded things, discovered some Bug midway and fixed it and compensated for it best they could etc. These projects must be done in a few months so youre ready before the next conference cycle happens where someone does something related and now you need to rework your story and contribution claim, or at least you now also have to compare and compete with them. But let's say you took your time and now redid the experiment of the other prior work, but it doesn't agree with your numbers totally. You can email them or open a github issue. They answer perhaps in a week, and say they don't know exactly the reason, or that it was a different code version they actually used but they can't release that one as it's not approved by corporate (from real experience). Of course with your questions you are also terrifying them and your queries may feel to them like threats of pending potential reputation destruction. So they will be very defensive, which will make you suspicious. But they are just some other grad student like you and probably didn't mean any ill. I've seen a PhD student on Twitter asking what he should do after discovering an anomaly in an Arxiv paper before the camera ready deadline (the finalized version of an article). Should he publicly "out" them if they fail to incorporate his findings. Of course it is absurd and the camera ready deadline cannot introduce significant new contributions or new discoveries, as that would require new peer review. But he was convinced that he's a noble defender of scientific integrity while doing this. I'm just mentioning this because some junior people may read these Feynman pieces and think they should go on a crusade based on often quite scarce information. But again, think of the sheer volume of works coming out every week. It's unmanageable. If you stopped to interact with every single prior work of your comparison table in such detail you'd take years to write one paper. A PhD student usually has to publish 3 top papers in about 4 years or so. And some will definitely get rejected. The reality is that high-end labs have become paper factories. They have a process, just like pop songs are formulaic. They get a smart person as an intern for example and pump out a paper in 5 months. Exactly how much of this "you are the easiest person to fool" deep self-reflection fits into such a thing? And yet. And yet the cumulative effect is undeniable progress. The thousands of low quality papers are simply ignored. They contribute to someone getting their PhD, and that's their true function. But then there is a small set of works that really are excellent. It's just that the publicly available papertrail in the literature isn't really necessarily what has driven it. The papers are more like a shadow projection of the real world work behind the scenes, filtered to please novelty-hungry impatient reviewers and paper-count-rewarding committees. But of course the sheer hardware growth is a big part of the overall success, but the hardware design was informed by the research, and without the model improvements, you couldn't just hardware-scale the state of the art of 1995 to modern computes and expect strong results. So for sure the spirit that Feynman espouses here still lives on, but it's alive despite all the incentives, and most of what appears as academic science is not really about contributing some truly usable and convincing knowledge, but a demonstration of the job skills of people towards various personal evaluations, like granting a degree, hiring or promotion. Most people who start with this starry eyed idealism quickly get it stamped out by the system. The important thing is to yield a productive synthesis instead of a resignatory pessimism. Do your best given the circumstances, but also read the room and don't run with your head into the wall. The fabulous thing is though, that things adapt. The less these hurried processes live up to the ideal, the more the reputation of the label "science" gets eroded. Many people already react with an eye roll when they hear what "experts" and "The Science" have to say. The trust is finite and can run out. A few major discoveries in physics and medicine led to a giant reserve of public trust over the last century, but it isn't infinite. Immediately after the moon landing, in the space age, science and scifi captivated the minds of everyone and that was probably the peak of it, including figures like Sagan (or indeed Feynman). Then computing brought a new wave of tech but it, and even AI is less of a natural science, and many popular claims turn out to be overblown. --- Anyway, we have no idea what exactly made the 100 years between, say, 1870 and 1970 so scientifically productive. Because that's the period that lends the weight to the label "science" in the public and hence for politicians. It certainly wasn't the current academic system of journals and conferences and 8-page papers and rushed peer review, h-indexes and byzantine grant application forms. And whenever something has prestige, people flock to it and want to also bask in it. And it gets inevitably diluted. But the prestige will move on and there will be some other thing next. Something we will call something else than "science".
nextmove 3y ago
Agreed with everything Feynman wrote. Monkey see, monkey do. Even if someone questions what everyone else believes is true because "scientists said it", they will only be downvoted and censored.
trinsic2 3y ago
> In the past, I’ve been effusive of my praise of CNET, a news outlet that (along with Wired) pioneered digital journalism, I'm sorry, I can't take anyone that thinks CNET and Wired is a bastion of digital journalism seriously. It's well known that these sites focus on 80% profit and 20% Journalism. It's been that way from the beginning.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
js2 3y ago
HTML version which I find easier to read: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

230 points by _cnhi 3y ago

In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. 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—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

throw18376 3y ago

I have heard that some anthropologists now have a more complicated view of the cargo cults. They argue that, even if there was some notion of making cargo appear, their main purpose was more political and social. It was an opportunity for the locals to move around in organized groups, even march around doing military drills, without causing the colonial leadership to panic and retaliate. It would bind people together socially and get them used to coordinating under a leader, whose legitimacy would be enhanced. Sometimes people now claim that "cargo cult science" is not really a good analogy and should be abandoned. However, I think this newer understanding of cargo cults may actually make it an even better analogy. Even if a line of scientific ideas is mostly fake and its research practices can't possibly lead to truth, participating in this ritual of fake research, giving talks about it, and other science-shaped activities, still does bind the participants together. It lends prestige to the leaders of the field. It gives everyone a way to coordinate politically around securing funding and legitimacy from higher powers for their fake research area. And we've seen you really can keep a field going this way for a very long time even if the planes never land.

Drakim 3y ago
That is a very interesting view, thank you for sharing it. I've often used "cargo cults" as a way to categorize stupid ritualistic things about the world I didn't like, but it's good to be reminded that the world isn't so two dimensional.
- tuyiown 3y ago
  This is a problem with the cargo cult analogy, the observer assumes to be an outsider, while it would be more useful to the observer to assume of being part of it.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    It is very difficult to be a part of a different group. Even if you move there it would often take years to become a member, if you ever can get that much trust. The idea is sound, but don't assume you understand the members enough to do a good job.
    - vitiral 3y ago
      I think they meant you should assume that YOU are part of a cargo cult. You should look for ways your own viewpoints/society/etc are cargo-cultish
      - prox 3y ago
        Like Feynman says “The first principle is not to fool yourself, and you are the easiest to fool.”
      - mistermann 3y ago
        Case in point: >> I think a better example of a cargo cult than bad science is climate change denial. The followers see the potential loss of "cargo" in the form of their current way of life as a problem and the leaders apply the skills that brought them success in politics to that problem. Someone good at reading legal documents is going to think that there is something wrong with scientific papers. Specifically: "The followers see..." - it is not known what climate change "deniers" believe - rather, people tell each other stories about what they believe, and believe these stories to be true. Some humans are currently smart enough to realize that this behavior is flawed in certain scenarios (race/gender/etc stereotypes), but when it comes to ~political stereotyping the mind (and mainstream "right thinking" culture/media/etc) will defend the delusional practice to the death. Typically these topic are argued primarily using memes (Gish Gallop, Whataboutism, Brandolini's Law, etc) and rhetoric (rendering it not possible for a strict logical perspective to "win"), with some stats and studies included to give the appearance of objectivity, permanently locking humans into this ~conceptual Overton Window. If humans could analyze and evaluate the system we are embedded in with the same emotional/psychological detachment we analyze computer systems with it would be a big improvement, but I do not see it happening anytime soon.

lpolovets 3y ago

I love this speech every time that I read it. There are a ton of examples of cargo cult thinking in the startup ecosystem. I wrote a post about this a few years back: https://www.codingvc.com/p/startup-cargo-cults-what-they-are-and-how-to-avoid-them https://www.codingvc.com/p/startup-cargo-cults-what-they-are... A few examples that come to mind: * because lots of famous VCs made contrarian bets, new VCs try to be contrarian (even when a consensus point of view is clearly correct). * almost every startup I know is looking for 10x engineers, even though most startups don't need 10x engineers. We've just all been conditioned to believe that 10x engineers are required to build a great company. * generalizing the 10x example, young startups copy the traits of FAANG companies or famously successful startups, even if those traits are harmful for early stage companies. Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool." Also, here's a text version of the OP that's easier to read on mobile: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

amelius 3y ago
Apple comes close to having started a cargo cult. People think that if they keep saying nice things about Apple, they will not one day lock them down hard.
- EarthLaunch 3y ago
  People aren't saying nice things about Apple to appease Apple from locking things down. People who rebelliously use non-Apple products are helping to keep the alternatives alive. It's a tradeoff of now vs future. That's the real tradeoff, it's not cults. (edits: HN vs who?)
- Drakim 3y ago
  It's more complicated than that, a lot of the people who says that Apple keeps things secure and tight compared to Android's wild west will themselves have a jail-broken iPhone. The iPhone was hot when it came out, and was a lot of people's first taste of the smartphone, and it's very easy to fall into tribalism. You and I aren't immune to it, there are hundreds of things we are irrational about in our lives. Arguments in favor of your chosen tribe are proxy arguments for preserving your own value, identity, and dignity.

obscurette 3y ago

Probably even more relevant in HN – https://stevemcconnell.com/articles/cargo-cult-software-engineering/ https://stevemcconnell.com/articles/cargo-cult-software-engi...

hliyan 3y ago
I wrote something similar in 2021: https://medium.com/the-engineering-manager-guide/cargo-cult-programming-is-killing-the-sri-lankan-software-industry-e5e9fc9a3ff9 https://medium.com/the-engineering-manager-guide/cargo-cult-...

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago

James Knochel, 6/18/2022: "20th Century psychiatrists wrote manuals and procedures for the diagnosis of ‘mental disorders’. They order lab tests and undertake careful study of their patients’ symptoms, and they diagnose the conditions listed in their manuals. They seek regulatory approval of prescriptions to treat the diagnoses. They stopped doing psycho-surgery by mid-century, but still electrocute their patients’ brains when they think the patient will benefit. They have their own special hospitals, where troubled patients are sent to be stabilized on palliative prescription drugs. The psych wards have little areas for staff to sit in. The staff wear scrubs and badges, keep medical records, and some prescribe prescriptions—[s]he’s the doctor—and they wait for their patients to get better. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looks in the other medical specialties. But it doesn’t work. No patient recovers as a result of the allopathic drugs provided. Some patients get better anyways—perhaps because they’re fed, perhaps because they’re kept sober—compounding the profession’s confusion." It's true. People get better in psychiatric incarceration, because there is a predictable, regular daily schedule. There are meals on schedule. There are groups and stuff. You see the same people all the time. You're off TV and you're off the computer, so you need to face reality. You're relieved of burdens such as bill paying, cooking, cleaning, and running your household. You might color by the numbers or work a puzzle, but you've got reality, and it's stripped down and reduced to its essential components. You tend to get better and saner in this environment, if that's your baseline and that's where you tend to go. If your baseline is insanity, then all this regularity may not help.

Daub 3y ago
> the form [of their science] is perfect. The reason the British Houses of Parliament feature so many exterior and interior chimneys was to funnel so-called 'bad air' of the Thames away from the people who work inside the building. This was based on the newly acquired knowledge that some diseases are passed on via microbes. They wrongly assumed that most malicious microbes were airborne and that bad smells were an indication of their presence. The history of science is littered with such examples of 'good science/wrong conclusion'. We would be foolish to assume that this is not as true today as 100 years ago.

hellothere1337 3y ago

Cargo culting is one of those mental models that appears everywhere once you learn about it. Similar to kayfabe in wrestling and politics. 99.9% of humanity basically is winging it daily (by copying the shallowest parts of whatever philosophy/ideology they espouse) pretending they know everything while the 0.01% is honest with themselves and thus are free to question and doubt their own ideas in order to improve them. This 0.1% is mostly invisible despite pushing humanity forward

karmakurtisaani 3y ago
Wait, did you just wing those percentages?
- tomcam 3y ago
  76.7% of Hacker News readers believe so
josephg 3y ago
I assume you place yourself in that 0.1%? Or was it 0.01%? Personally, I think we're all winging it almost every moment of our lives. Relative to domain experts, I'm bad at almost everything I do. (Cooking, driving, talking, writing, planning, etc). I'm only really good at maybe 2 or 3 things. I think we're all like this. And its fundamentally ok. Its how human brains are wired. Sometimes I imagine dividing all my thoughts between things I've personally invented and things I've heard from others. Whats the ratio? I think at least 95% of my thoughts come from other people. Maybe 99%. Maybe more.
- hellothere1337 3y ago
  Nah I'm pretty stupid and follow the herd, its the reason for my success too!
- bagacrap 3y ago
  How could you even tell if you've personally invented something? You don't know what caused a thought to pop into your head. Heck I often forget things I've said, so I clearly forget things I've heard. I could be fully convinced an idea was my own and still be dead wrong. Luckily you can build on the ideas of others without being a cargo cultist. Simply verify the sturdiness of the foundation before you go adding an extra wing to the house.

fsh 3y ago

My current favorite cargo cult is the quantum computing scene. No practical quantum computer exists, and nobody has a realistic concept for building one. Yet, there are dozens of startups and research groups developing quantum algorithms, quantum cloud computing solutions, etc. They seem to believe that blindly copying what silicon valley did must surely lead to success. What they are missing (or are refusing to accept) is that silicon valley was only successful because they had useful computers from the very beginning. In Germany, the cargo cult was even enshrined in the names of two research clusters ("Munich Quantum Valley" and "Quantum Valley Lower Saxony").

ascar 3y ago
> No practical quantum computer exists, and nobody has a realistic concept for building one. Can you expand on that? I'm not involved in the field, but there certainly exist many low qbit machines with varying technologies around the world that can already be used for calculations. Yes, they're nowhere near big enough to be useful yet, but qbit counts in the biggest machines are multiplying every year similar to Moore's law, so that seems to be just a matter of time.
- Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago
  > qbit counts in the biggest machines are multiplying every year similar to Moore's law, so that seems to be just a matter of time. That's pretty much my take on it too, just because it's pretty limited right now there appears to be healthy growth in qbit counts which would suggest a more usable quantum computer is mostly a matter of time and further research.
  - upofadown 3y ago
    It doesn't matter how many qubits you have if those qubits are too noisy to do anything with. Noise is the ultimate limit when trying to get a useful signal out of something. Noise is how the universe stops us from knowing everything about everything.
- fastneutron 3y ago

sfpotter 3y ago

People on HN love this article. I think it's because people on HN have a self-flattering view of themselves and their intelligence. The irony is that HN is itself a cargo cult.

marginalia_nu 3y ago
To be fair it's also Feynman. He's always entertaining.
tomcam 3y ago
Most people overestimate their intelligence, HNers or not. There’s even a name for it. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8883889/#:~:text=People's%20perceptions%20of%20their%20intelligence,On%20average%2C%20people%20overestimate%20themselves https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8883889/#:~:tex....

lloeki 3y ago

I was looking for any kind of recording of Feynman's address, all I could find is a third party narrated version, which probably lacks Feynman's unique delivery: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yvfAtIJbatg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yvfAtIJbatg

bagacrap 3y ago
Can't AI fix this problem yet

sturza 3y ago

> It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty—a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid—not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked—to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated. Feels appropriate to the current LK99 discussions

gadders 3y ago

I saw some archive footage of him speaking recently and I loved that he kept his blue collar (to my British ears) Brooklyn accent.

JKCalhoun 3y ago
It is kind of funny to me. I'm not sure he could help it though, ha ha.

henrydark 3y ago

I hope this isn't received too badly on HN, but Feynman was way too smug sometimes. This speech is essentially a philosophy of science piece, at the intellectual stage of at least one hundred years prior, and probably more like three hundred. It's too bad that he so diminished philosophy of science, and at the same time put so much undeveloped thought and prose into it.

mandmandam 3y ago
I'll bite. > way too smug sometimes Immediately after: > This speech is essentially a philosophy of science piece, at the intellectual stage of at least one hundred years prior, and probably more like three hundred. Bruh. Apart from the hypocrisy there, the fact is Feynman did science. He did more science than Popper, Kuhn, and Hume put together. He understood it on a level deeper than >99% of other scientists, and >99.9% of philosophers. That he did so with a "three hundred year" out of date view doesn't really reflect well on PoS's utility for actual scientists. Let people who are that capable and accomplished have a blind spot once in a while. What is this trend of cutting legend's ankles gonna accomplish for anybody.
- bonoboTP 3y ago
  It's a weird beef between science and philosophy. It doesn't really make all that much sense. Philosophers arent on one team versus the scientists. If you read any philosopher, they'll vehemently contradict other (prior or contemporary) philosophers, passionately arguing for their view of things. Its a sort of elitism and inferiority complex. The fact that Feynman was working through some "naive" positivist worldview and yet achieved such success just rubs it in more that a talented scientist needs philosophers about as much as a bird needs ornithologists to know how to build its nest. When talent, curiosity and integrity come together in this way, it doesn't need some philosophers musings and rulebooks to do great.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    > The fact that Feynman was working through some "naive" positivist worldview and yet achieved such success just rubs it in more that a talented scientist needs philosophers about as much as a bird needs ornithologists to know how to build its nest. How's that global warming thing coming along? Let me guess: it isn't relevant?

uwagar 3y ago

it could be the tribals were critiquing how american military conducts itself in tropical lands.

bschne 3y ago

I read this extension of the concept a while back that dives a bit more into what's actually missing in the "cargo cult" approach, and how to transition to actual productivity — https://metarationality.com/upgrade-your-cargo-cult#upgrading https://metarationality.com/upgrade-your-cargo-cult#upgradin...

fnord77 3y ago

crypto seems like a massive cargo cult

bagacrap 3y ago
I would have just called it a regular cult ("give me all your money and you'll receive great riches in return"). It's true that adherents to crypto have a faulty understanding of traditional finance just as the islanders have a faulty understanding of airplanes and canned food. But rather than painstakingly recreating the minute details of traditional finance in hopes of capturing the same success, crypto cults go out of their way to avoid recreating those details or understanding why they're necessary, if burdensome.

swayvil 3y ago

Isn't "cargo-cult-science" simply "engineering"? You use the models handed down by the researchers because they work. They help you make machines and navigate reality and such. There's nothing shameful in that. You don't have the time for research. Time is money after all. You are not a scientist. You are not interested in Truth. You just want to get from A to B.

bagacrap 3y ago
Yes, Stack Overflow is also cargo cult programming. Of course sometimes you have to use tools handed to you by others and sometimes you won't understand how they work (I don't know how CPUs work but it hasn't stopped me from programming). This speech is largely about how you shouldn't willfully delude yourself. I think we've all had that situation where we're hunting down a bug and rearranging the code just so seems to resolve it, but we don't understand why. At a certain point the temptation is high to shrug your shoulders and move on even without fully understanding the mechanics of the fix. But if you do that, it will likely come back to bite you/someone one day. In the case of science it's even worse than engineering because the entire point of the endeavor should be to advance understanding, rather than to get certain results.
Sharlin 3y ago
No. A cargo cult is about doing X, or more commonly some flawed facsimile of X, in order to attain some desirable Y, because you've seen someone else do X and indeed attaining Y. What you don't know, however, that Y is not directly caused by X but there exists some W that's the cause of both X and Y. Now, "Y after X thus Y caused by X" (see: post hoc ergo propter hoc) is a perfectly fine hypothesis worth testing, but to keep doing that even if it doesn't work? That's the "cult" part. What Feynman criticized were certain fields of study, which in his opinion claimed to apply the scientific method to get scientific results (and importantly the associated prestige of Doing Science), but which in his view only practiced a facsimile of the scientific method and got merely facsimiles of scientific results! Now, cargo cult engineering definitely also exists. If you do X – even without entirely understanding why – and reliably get the wanted result Y, that's engineering. If you don't get exactly Y but are able to adjust X to compensate, that's also engineering. But if you keep doing X without understanding why and keep not getting the wanted result Y (even though you might get some different result Z and misinterpret it as Y), that's cargo cult engineering!

inquirerGeneral 3y ago

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rossdavidh 3y ago

One point rarely mentioned in regards to Cargo Cultism, is that the fundamental error of the cargo cultists wasn't that they didn't understand what made the planes land. The fundamental error was that they kept doing it, even though it wasn't working. We don't know how a lot of our most effective pharmaceuticals work, but we at least know to stop using them if (in a rigorous test) they don't work (although people with $$ in their eyes sometimes try to get us to do it anyway). Now, the magnitude of the error would depend on how long the cargo cultists kept doing this, even though the planes didn't return, and I have never heard how long that was. If they tried this for a month or two, it's not that bad an error, really; it was worth a try, based on what they knew. If they did this for decades, that would be a serious error.

themodelplumber 3y ago
> kept doing it, even though it wasn't working It was working though. It was maintaining a new state of social order, which is a mandate for sustainable power transfer in society.
Sharlin 3y ago
> If they did this for decades, that would be a serious error. Assuming they didn't get other benefits from the rituals, namely the same ones people get from more mainstream religions like social cohesion and a sense of purpose and a belief in some greater power.
gremlinunderway 3y ago
Except the cargo cult religions weren't trying to get cargo to return in any meaningful sense. It was a religious ritual like anyother. If we were watching Christian practices from the outside and not knowing any of the nuances of their beliefs we would probably interpret that "they're trying to get this guy named Jesus to return by eating crackers and wine". Feynman's speech is interesting and all but like so many similar gifted scientists who then go on to explore into other domains, they stumble into a field and ignore whole bodies of research into the philosophy and sociology of how science is produced. Thomas Kuhn had already established some solid insight into the social and organizational aspects of "scientific revolution", and showed that despite most people's ardent belief that science is somehow immune to it, there is a significant amount of social hierarchies and ritualistic beliefs that dictate what is considered "acceptable" science. Believing in science as this perfect immutable meritocracy is pretty much its own ritualistic cult, as if you can just pretend away human bias and insular beliefs by thinking really-really hard.

bonoboTP 3y ago

I'm only really familiar with machine learning and computer vision papers and many of the mentioned aspects, especially Mr. Young's rat running experiments have their analogs here. There is a ton of accumulated "dark knowledge" locked up in research groups, all the tricks (like putting the rat corridor on sand, in that example) but they are not really publishable. To publish, you need a clear story, literally that's the word we use when drafting papers. What's your story? A bunch of boring tricks rarely make a good story. And when people do publish such things, they have to also insert some other conceptual "novelty" contribution (typically a non intuitive tweak of the model architecture) to the paper that makes a +0.5% improvement on some benchmark, just to be able to talk about the real practical but ugly things that really make the whole thing work. Not to mention the replications that Feynman mentions, ie that before you test your tweaked new model, you have to also perform the baseline yourself, you can't just take it as given in another person's paper. This is rarely done in ML, and not just for resource scarcity reasons. Another reason is that it's damn hard. ML systems are very very complex and essentially impossible to exactly reproduce from a paper description. It would even be hard for the same team to do it, if we deleted their codebase and checkpoints and asked them to redo it. "But open source!" you say. Sure, except that large systems often evolve and the released code is often a refactored version of a haphazard ducktaped spaghetti monster codebase that was actually used, where they manually edited code files between runs, or hard-coded things, discovered some Bug midway and fixed it and compensated for it best they could etc. These projects must be done in a few months so youre ready before the next conference cycle happens where someone does something related and now you need to rework your story and contribution claim, or at least you now also have to compare and compete with them. But let's say you took your time and now redid the experiment of the other prior work, but it doesn't agree with your numbers totally. You can email them or open a github issue. They answer perhaps in a week, and say they don't know exactly the reason, or that it was a different code version they actually used but they can't release that one as it's not approved by corporate (from real experience). Of course with your questions you are also terrifying them and your queries may feel to them like threats of pending potential reputation destruction. So they will be very defensive, which will make you suspicious. But they are just some other grad student like you and probably didn't mean any ill. I've seen a PhD student on Twitter asking what he should do after discovering an anomaly in an Arxiv paper before the camera ready deadline (the finalized version of an article). Should he publicly "out" them if they fail to incorporate his findings. Of course it is absurd and the camera ready deadline cannot introduce significant new contributions or new discoveries, as that would require new peer review. But he was convinced that he's a noble defender of scientific integrity while doing this. I'm just mentioning this because some junior people may read these Feynman pieces and think they should go on a crusade based on often quite scarce information. But again, think of the sheer volume of works coming out every week. It's unmanageable. If you stopped to interact with every single prior work of your comparison table in such detail you'd take years to write one paper. A PhD student usually has to publish 3 top papers in about 4 years or so. And some will definitely get rejected. The reality is that high-end labs have become paper factories. They have a process, just like pop songs are formulaic. They get a smart person as an intern for example and pump out a paper in 5 months. Exactly how much of this "you are the easiest person to fool" deep self-reflection fits into such a thing? And yet. And yet the cumulative effect is undeniable progress. The thousands of low quality papers are simply ignored. They contribute to someone getting their PhD, and that's their true function. But then there is a small set of works that really are excellent. It's just that the publicly available papertrail in the literature isn't really necessarily what has driven it. The papers are more like a shadow projection of the real world work behind the scenes, filtered to please novelty-hungry impatient reviewers and paper-count-rewarding committees. But of course the sheer hardware growth is a big part of the overall success, but the hardware design was informed by the research, and without the model improvements, you couldn't just hardware-scale the state of the art of 1995 to modern computes and expect strong results. So for sure the spirit that Feynman espouses here still lives on, but it's alive despite all the incentives, and most of what appears as academic science is not really about contributing some truly usable and convincing knowledge, but a demonstration of the job skills of people towards various personal evaluations, like granting a degree, hiring or promotion. Most people who start with this starry eyed idealism quickly get it stamped out by the system. The important thing is to yield a productive synthesis instead of a resignatory pessimism. Do your best given the circumstances, but also read the room and don't run with your head into the wall. The fabulous thing is though, that things adapt. The less these hurried processes live up to the ideal, the more the reputation of the label "science" gets eroded. Many people already react with an eye roll when they hear what "experts" and "The Science" have to say. The trust is finite and can run out. A few major discoveries in physics and medicine led to a giant reserve of public trust over the last century, but it isn't infinite. Immediately after the moon landing, in the space age, science and scifi captivated the minds of everyone and that was probably the peak of it, including figures like Sagan (or indeed Feynman). Then computing brought a new wave of tech but it, and even AI is less of a natural science, and many popular claims turn out to be overblown. --- Anyway, we have no idea what exactly made the 100 years between, say, 1870 and 1970 so scientifically productive. Because that's the period that lends the weight to the label "science" in the public and hence for politicians. It certainly wasn't the current academic system of journals and conferences and 8-page papers and rushed peer review, h-indexes and byzantine grant application forms. And whenever something has prestige, people flock to it and want to also bask in it. And it gets inevitably diluted. But the prestige will move on and there will be some other thing next. Something we will call something else than "science".

nextmove 3y ago

Agreed with everything Feynman wrote. Monkey see, monkey do. Even if someone questions what everyone else believes is true because "scientists said it", they will only be downvoted and censored.

trinsic2 3y ago

> In the past, I’ve been effusive of my praise of CNET, a news outlet that (along with Wired) pioneered digital journalism, I'm sorry, I can't take anyone that thinks CNET and Wired is a bastion of digital journalism seriously. It's well known that these sites focus on 80% profit and 20% Journalism. It's been that way from the beginning.

deleted 3y ago
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js2 3y ago

HTML version which I find easier to read: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm