
Cargo-culting to success and understanding - llambda
http://cemerick.com/2012/12/20/cargo-culting-to-success-and-understanding/
======
debacle
Your premise is based on an improper definition of "cargo cult."

> By “cargo-culting”, I was generally referring to doing something without
> properly knowing why it might be good or bad.

That is not what cargo culting is.

Cargo culting is creating an expectation ("If A, then B") based on inaccurate
or incomplete observations.

You then go on to list examples, of which two are cargo cult. The database
indexes one is just stupid.

You're trying to redefine cargo cult to make yourself seem less wrong, and in
the end you go back to navel-gazing.

~~~
cemerick
"Cargo-culting" has been redefined and repurposed many, many times for
different domains (science, programming, software engineering, etc). It's the
closest term I know of to name the process I describe, so that's what I used.
As you can see from the post, I'm aware of the semantic and etymological
difficulty. If you have a better term you'd like to suggest, I'm all ears;
having it won't make the process I describe "more wrong" though.

To use your characterization, the database index example is where someone has
an expectation that adding indexes are a valid reflexive response to slow
querying.

Of course the post goes back to navel-gazing in the end. It started out with a
tweet, so I'm not sure why you'd expect anything less. In any case, I hope the
space in between proves useful or thought-provoking to some.

~~~
debacle
Actually, I don't believe it has.

Cargo culting, since the very beginning, is the mimicry by a poseur of someone
doing the mimicked action in order to produce similar results.

There is no semantic or etymological difficulty. The process you describe has
nothing to do with cargo cult.

------
lprubin
For those interested in the original origin of the phrase "cargo cult," during
WWII a bunch of American soldiers landed in a small island chain in the
Pacific called Melanesia. They showed up out of nowhere with huge ships and
planes, brought a bunch of food, vehicles and contraptions, looked and spoke
completely differently than the inhabitants had hardly seen in such numbers.
The GIs shared their food, gave little gifts to the natives, and then abruptly
left.

The locals then built altars (such as the straw plane in the OP) in the hopes
of luring back the "visiters from another place" and ushering in another era
of abundance. They became a "Cargo Cult."

And it's hard to blame them. That must have been an absolutely worldview
shattering experience.

------
return0
It would be interesting to find out why a large number of people upvoted a
blog post about a simple harmless misunderstanding. Was it the phrase "cargo
cult"? Feynman wrote about the same thing in science :
<http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3043/1/CargoCult.pdf>

~~~
AndrewNCarr
My observation of HN is that any link title mentioning cargo cult or
skeuomorphism is upvoted into orbit.

It is worth reading the wikipedia article on the subject:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult>

I've always thought the idea was linked to the concept of the Outside Context
Problem, as a temporary case (the US service personnel eventually left, giving
rise to the cult). Iain Banks purportedly coined this term and uses this as
the basis of his novel Excession:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outside_Context_Problem#Outsid...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outside_Context_Problem#Outside_Context_Problem)

Amusingly, Banks also had a ship named Cargo Cult in another Culture novel
(The Player of Games).

