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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 appea

• 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.
  • xorcist 3y ago
    One does not have to look far from our current field to find similar rituals. More than one capital-A style agile consultants have told me that they don't really believe their scripture but the job pays well. I can believe that. I work with Kubernetes-shaped objects, and the rituals we go through can not in any way be technically motivated. But there are conferences held and new software written so who cares, really. Nobody really needs this stuff and we all know it.
• teawrecks 3y ago
  It sounds like you're just describing a religion/cult. All talk, all faith in each other, no substance to back it up, no one dare doubting what is established as true. It's almost like that's where the name came from.
  • lqet 3y ago
    A group of people integrated by a lie can achieve things orders of magnitude greater than the same number of mavericks living their lives fully grounded on evident truths. This is the evolutionary explanation of religion/cults in a nutshell.
    • katzgrau 3y ago
      Integrated by a belief? Whether it's true or not is irrelevant and subjective.
      • lqet 3y ago
        I agree, belief is the better word here.
  • wellanyway 3y ago
    Religion is society worshipping itself
• archepyx 3y ago
  Wikipedia seems to be a good first stop here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult and contains several other useful references for entering the rabbit hole of what these cults are and why they appeared.
• fosk 3y ago
  > 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. You just described modern US politics.
• verisimi 3y ago
  Great last paragraph! As with any and all human institutions, even those started with the best of intentions, it is surely just a matter of time before money and power corrupt and bend whatever-it-is to server money and power.
• prepend 3y ago
  > 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 seems like we have entered the explanation phase where reasons are discovered where the stupid and pointless thing actually had some minimal benefit that in no way was worth the effort expended. I think this is generally a good sign as it means the pain from the event is fading and so people can reflect on it in sort of silly and absurd ways.
• hliyan 3y ago
  Then this seems to be true of cargo cult programming too: blockchain, NFT, machine learning, agile, cloud-native, big data (or take your pick) enthusiasts creating a great deal of online chatter, organising conventions etc., not merely out of innocent fanaticism, but as a deliberate means to a) draw in VC money b) create consulting opportunities c) build personal branding and finally, d) pad CVs.
• csomar 3y ago
  > And we've seen you really can keep a field going this way for a very long time even if the planes never land. And it's in many places, if not everywhere. People mock the Polynesians for engaging in a Cargo Cult but they don't realize that most countries do that in more "sophisticated" ways. Think about the big infrastructure projects that some "dictators" do in some countries. It would make more sense for the dictator to just pocket the money, or distribute it equally if he wants to give it up. But these projects and their prevalence suggests another dynamic at play here.
  • rsynnott 3y ago
    > Think about the big infrastructure projects that some "dictators" do in some countries. It would make more sense for the dictator to just pocket the money, or distribute it equally if he wants to give it up. But these projects and their prevalence suggests another dynamic at play here. I mean, ultimately infrastructure is an investment. Now, it might be a _bad_ investment; some infra projects don’t make sense. But there’s a fairly obvious reason to do them, and even in totalitarian countries many are good investments.
• rjsw 3y ago
  I suspect that the leaders of the cargo cults were leaders in that society before the "Outside Context Problem" happened, and that the ideas followed by the cult will come from what kind of leader they were. If they were previously a religious leader then the cult would look like a religion. 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. A climate change denial group in the UK [1] rented office space from one of the scientific institutions that used to meet in Carlton House Terrace. The GWPF held meetings where they could talk in a sciency way even though they were not reporting any real science that they had done themselves. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Warming_Policy_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Global_Warming_Policy_Foun...
• momirlan 3y ago
  doomsday cults also bind participants together...
• mannykannot 3y ago
  This more extensive understanding of cargo cults does not seem to contradict the key element which both distinguishes them from other responses to contact with technologically-developed cultures, and which makes them a useful analogy for Feynman's point: they are activities organized around a profound misunderstanding of the causes behind the phenomena of interest.
• 0x445442 3y ago
  A better analogy and even more negative. The Cargo Cult label that harkens to Pop Fashion is much less damnable than than which harkens to political dynamics.
• lisper 3y ago
  A perfect example of this is the young-earth creationism movement, which is a fully fledged cargo cult in this sense. It publishes legitimate-looking books and papers, has intellectual leaders who are highly regarded within the group, and an army of well-trained foot soldiers on YouTube and other social media sites. Cargo cults are by no means limited to Polynesia, or even less developed countries. They are everywhere.
  • rcme 3y ago
    I mean pretty much all religion is a cargo cult. How is a cargo cult fundamentally different than Catholicism, which has a series of rituals in preparation of the return of Jesus?
    • lisper 3y ago
      I guess I wasn't entirely clear on this, but I meant that YEC is an example of cargo cult science in the sense described by the GP.
    • klysm 3y ago
      Generally religions have some justification for practicing revolving around what happens after you die
      • rcme 3y ago
        Isn’t that the same thing as a cargo cult? The key shared similarity is that neither religious people nor cargo cultists understand how their desired goal works (a good afterlife or cargo respectively). Both groups believe they can obtain their desired goal, despite having no knowledge of its mechanism of action, if they blindly carry out their respective rituals.
• gremlinunderway 3y ago
  Yup there's even a very fascinating documentary about this called Waiting For John Frum. It traces the history of background from the insane colonial administration to what led to the development of the John Frum cult. Basically the gist as I understood it is that when Christian colonial missionaries arrived on Tanna Island, they banned all the local religious practices and quickly established themselves as the sole administrator and authority on the island (giving out harsh discipline and torture basically to maintain this power). Once WWII comes around, all the missionaries fled, and soon the Americans arrived bringing with them cargo and gear and importantly, employment and autonomy. Locals were used as couriers and carried supplies in support of the Americans, and in return were given "goods" that were to them simply unheard of before. When the Americans left, the colonial missionaries returned, but because so many people gained this autonomy and ability to practice their former religious ideas, this "cargo cult" formed which essentially was formed by anyone who refused to partake in the Christian authoritarianism that was running the island. People joined simply because it allowed them to have freedom and autonomy and the movement basically fused previous religious practices with these rituals that the Americans brought. The "dream" for John Frum (i.e. the Americans) to return really meant a dream for independence and the Christian missionaries to leave.
• ycombinete 3y ago
  This view of cargo cults appears to be reversing the proximate and ultimate causes. That said, I thoroughly agree with your last paragraph.
• zeroCalories 3y ago
  This is a real problem. Realistically, a well researched flat earth scientist could destroy the average nasa scientist in a debate. You only need to lie about or misrepresent a few facts to undermine a whole field, and to an outside observer it looks like science got conclusively btfo. Of course, given enough time the nasa scientist will be able to piece things together, but they might never be able to recover some people. While there are legitimate concerns about the scientific method being too strict, I think it's necessary to help us keep faith in a field. That's why I dislike fields that lean into methodological anarchy, like critical theory. They really have no business claiming any sort of authority.
  • msla 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law > The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. The logical conclusion of that is the Gish Gallop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop > The Gish gallop /ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/ is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality. The term was coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who named it after American creationist Duane Gish and argued that Gish used the technique frequently when challenging the scientific fact of evolution.[1][2] Even if it's a moderated debate where an outright gallop isn't allowed, it's still easier for the dishonest party to erect a strawman claim than it is for the honest one to carefully rebut it, especially if the dishonest claim is so far into wackyland it's Not Even Wrong and requires a lot of its assumed premises to be demolished first.
    • Loughla 3y ago
      And with how modern media is structured, for short drive-by statements and social media engagement, this (I would argue natural) human argument style is made a thousand times worse.
  • mistermann 3y ago
• romusha 3y ago
  *clap beautiful, this is exactly what's happening