If the act never succeeded, nobody would join the cult. It sometimes succeeds, and you get the valuables: funding, whether via grants or employment or social score (which is the next sentence after what you copied). For the cults: those ships did bring cargo! That's how they knew ships carried people and cargo.
And because it's a cult, rather than science/programming, they have no explanation of why it fails when it fails. They're stuck repeating the cult practices (copy/paste more things, maybe reverse some if statements) until it succeeds again, which is just further evidence to the members that it does actually work.
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I can be game to drop the term (shockumentaries are worth leaning away from), but the thing it's identifying is extremely real, and a very large problem. It deserves to be labeled and called out. Sure, it's sometimes used inaccurately... but show me a term that can't be used inaccurately. That's just humanity doing its normal thing. Is it used too inaccurately? ...ehhh, I'm not convinced, but it might be borderline.
TBH I think that the modern-re-defining is just not all that far off (outside the fabricated stuff obviously). There's no "the world is ending and the dead are coming back with stuff" or "what's ours has been stolen" in the current use (... except maybe job losses due to automation), but there is a large chunk like you point out: rituals and technology that mimic things they have seen, and which don't work because of the lack of understanding.
If there's a better label to apply to ^ that kind of act/cult/ritual, I have yet to see it. Probably there is, but it's currently drowned out by "cargo cult" so it's kinda hard to find unless you're deeply in that area already.
If the act never succeeded, nobody would join the cult. It sometimes succeeds, and you get the valuables: funding, whether via grants or employment or social score (which is the next sentence after what you copied). For the cults: those ships did bring cargo! That's how they knew ships carried people and cargo.
And because it's a cult, rather than science/programming, they have no explanation of why it fails when it fails. They're stuck repeating the cult practices (copy/paste more things, maybe reverse some if statements) until it succeeds again, which is just further evidence to the members that it does actually work.
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I can be game to drop the term (shockumentaries are worth leaning away from), but the thing it's identifying is extremely real, and a very large problem. It deserves to be labeled and called out. Sure, it's sometimes used inaccurately... but show me a term that can't be used inaccurately. That's just humanity doing its normal thing. Is it used too inaccurately? ...ehhh, I'm not convinced, but it might be borderline.
TBH I think that the modern-re-defining is just not all that far off (outside the fabricated stuff obviously). There's no "the world is ending and the dead are coming back with stuff" or "what's ours has been stolen" in the current use (... except maybe job losses due to automation), but there is a large chunk like you point out: rituals and technology that mimic things they have seen, and which don't work because of the lack of understanding.
If there's a better label to apply to ^ that kind of act/cult/ritual, I have yet to see it. Probably there is, but it's currently drowned out by "cargo cult" so it's kinda hard to find unless you're deeply in that area already.