This seems to be a characteristic of many high functioning people, especially successful engineers. There is a "correct" way of living your life, conducting your business, using your text editor, etc. It's helpful in that it ensures consistency and focus. The downside is that people become desensitised to nuance.
In this particular example, the word cargo in cargo cult is redundant. All cults have ridiculous ceremonies for cult members to engage in. These ceremonies come from human nature, our inability to distinguish correlation from causation. We're told to conduct a ceremony, get a good outcome, then believe it's the ceremonies that caused the outcome. Just call them ceremonies, because that's what they are.
However, when Feynman wrote his speech he must have thought that a cargo cult is a much more graphic metaphor than a dry lecture about stats and human biases.
Cargo cults are a specific kind of cult where the ceremonies come from imitating some other community. And complaints about cargo cult programming aren't only about people doing ineffective things, it's also about people seeing someone else doing something effectively but then not doing the work to understand why it's effective. It's a complaint about people being so close to being much more effective, but then snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
Did you read the article? That is very much the pop sci definition of cargo cult that is incorrect.
The cargo cults were made by people who were enslaved and violently oppressed and then believed that cargo they were forced to create for their oppressors (e.g. flour, rice, tobacco, and other trade) should belong to them
> believed that cargo they were forced to create for their oppressors
I'm not sure that was in the article was it?
These were exotic goods brought from overseas.
I'm not trying to say there was no oppression, but the examples in which they believed the trade goods should belong to them were still about trade goods which arrived by boat.
"[The leader proclaimed] that the ancestors were coming back in the persons of the white people in the country and that all the things introduced by the white people and the ships that brought them belonged really to their ancestors and themselves."
(edit - certainly these goods may well have been produced through the oppression of other peoples elsewhere!)
In this particular example, the word cargo in cargo cult is redundant. All cults have ridiculous ceremonies for cult members to engage in. These ceremonies come from human nature, our inability to distinguish correlation from causation. We're told to conduct a ceremony, get a good outcome, then believe it's the ceremonies that caused the outcome. Just call them ceremonies, because that's what they are.
However, when Feynman wrote his speech he must have thought that a cargo cult is a much more graphic metaphor than a dry lecture about stats and human biases.