I think the OP did a poor job of explaining what he meant by "Cargo Cult Science," and the single quoted paragraph from the Feynman essay which supposedly coins

I think the OP did a poor job of explaining what he meant by "Cargo Cult Science," and the single quoted paragraph from the Feynman essay which supposedly coins the term is inadequate. The best I can tell, the issue is adopting some of the forms and jargon of the physical sciences, without fully understanding them in a couple of particular ways, such as failing to: > try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another. ...or failing repeat previous experiments or to try to control for all variables. Here's the original essay: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm. That essay mentions that the root cause of the problem is that many of these ideas are never explicitly taught (at least at the time its writing). I wonder how much of this is due to stuff like the (historically) excessive prestige of the physical sciences leading to stuff like "physics envy" forcing other areas of activity to contort themselves into a distorted shape to fit a physical-science-shaped hole.