> Cargo cult is the result of a trap that our own brain seem to be wired to fall in That's because we're over-sensitive pattern matching machines. This is good

> Cargo cult is the result of a trap that our own brain seem to be wired to fall in That's because we're over-sensitive pattern matching machines. This is good because often recognising and learning patterns quickly is extremely important, far more so than some false positives. Our amygdala, for example, responds very quickly to simple patterns ("AAAAH A SNAKE"). Slower processing can then tell us it's actually a stick. The cost of a false positive VS a false negative here are quite clear. "Cargo Cult X" is always about us recognising a pattern and just blindly following it without understanding the causal links. Our poor (innate) understanding of probabilities means we can't really combine evidence well, but we can pattern match. Worse, because we start to feel like we understand what's happening we don't delve more into the problem. Even worse than that, we start to ignore evidence that doesn't fit the pattern since those examples look like outliers, and we quickly forget how often we've seen them. As situations get more subtle than "Snake or stick" the costs of being wrong in different ways change massively. A poor understanding of statistics in healthcare can kill significant numbers of people, similarly with economic or political interactions. Our brains are awful at complex statistics, but to be fair to them if our ancestors had waited for a double blind study on how likely a tiger was to eat you we would be here. Good work brains, but we need to stop listening to you now. Information on fear responses and the role the amygdala plays: http://labnic.unige.ch/papers/PV_cns2003_science.pdf http://labnic.unige.ch/papers/PV_cns2003_science.pdf