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 th

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.