I mean, I guess you could call Claudine Gay a cargo culter because she used a particular method without fully understanding its assumptions, but if you set the

I mean, I guess you could call Claudine Gay a cargo culter because she used a particular method without fully understanding its assumptions, but if you set the bar that high then almost nothing is going to pass. If you've ever been in academia, you know Jose Ortega y Gasset was right when he wrote: "it is necessary to insist upon this extraordinary but undeniable fact: experimental science has progressed thanks in great part to the work of men astoundingly mediocre, and even less than mediocre. That is to say, modern science, the root and symbol of our actual civilization, finds a place for the intellectually commonplace man and allows him to work therein with success." Most of us, most of the time, work with "recipes" that we think will produce good science, and often that works, except when it doesn't. As for Neri Oxman, the kind of word salad she spit out is definitely reminiscent of cargo cult behavior, but the motivation is different: if you're in a cult, you're a believer, whereas it's not clear to me that Oxman believes her own nonsense, and in any event she seems to tend to borrow stuff from other fields and does not presume to contribute to those fields. Consequently, her research doesn't really qualify as the kind of mimicking without understanding that Feynmen was talking about. So I guess I must ask: is Sven Schnieders (the author) cargo culting about cargo cult science?