4 ms·

If habit and convention == cargo cult, then the term is mostly useless; apart for its insult potential. To make it more useful we can move the goalpost back to

If habit and convention == cargo cult, then the term is mostly useless; apart for its insult potential. To make it more useful we can move the goalpost back to the roots, to include clear cluelessness and uselesness. (General slide advice is at same level as code indentation; almost everybody does it mostly same way; familiar == comfortable)

aspenmayer 2y ago
This is the original grandparent post context that I was responding to: > I think there is a lot of cargo culting in presentations. Title slide? But of course we must have a title slide, that is the way. And an introduction, and motivation... everybody else has one! The implied lack of justification, or doing something because that is simply how everyone else does it is consistent with the definition I posted from Wikipedia. It’s not mere habit or convention, but habit or convention without knowing the meaning or context. > To make it more useful we can move the goalpost back to the roots, to include clear cluelessness and uselesness. Again, I didn’t make this argument, so there’s no goalpost to move. You’re responding to things I didn’t say, and/or reading what I did say out of context. This is a misreading of my post, the GP post and wider context I placed my post in, and/or a straw man, or we actually are in agreement. My original post: >> Cargo cult programming is a style of computer programming characterized by the ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose. >> Cargo cult programming can also refer to the practice of applying a design pattern or coding style blindly without understanding the reasons behind that design principle. > Arguably, designing a presentation in a particular way out of habit or convention (and without knowing why that is conventional, or if that way of doing things has no known or stated justification, but is observed because that is the way things are done out of institutional momentum, and so on) > would fall under one or both of these definitions.

aspenmayer 2y ago

This is the original grandparent post context that I was responding to: > I think there is a lot of cargo culting in presentations. Title slide? But of course we must have a title slide, that is the way. And an introduction, and motivation... everybody else has one! The implied lack of justification, or doing something because that is simply how everyone else does it is consistent with the definition I posted from Wikipedia. It’s not mere habit or convention, but habit or convention without knowing the meaning or context. > To make it more useful we can move the goalpost back to the roots, to include clear cluelessness and uselesness. Again, I didn’t make this argument, so there’s no goalpost to move. You’re responding to things I didn’t say, and/or reading what I did say out of context. This is a misreading of my post, the GP post and wider context I placed my post in, and/or a straw man, or we actually are in agreement. My original post: >> Cargo cult programming is a style of computer programming characterized by the ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose. >> Cargo cult programming can also refer to the practice of applying a design pattern or coding style blindly without understanding the reasons behind that design principle. > Arguably, designing a presentation in a particular way out of habit or convention (and without knowing why that is conventional, or if that way of doing things has no known or stated justification, but is observed because that is the way things are done out of institutional momentum, and so on) > would fall under one or both of these definitions.