September 2, 2023: Cargo Cults

Good afternoon. There are a few generally applicable principles that are important for understanding the world. One of them, which I have referred to many times, is the Shirky Principle, which holds that “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” Many institutional behaviors, including policy positions adopted by advocacy organizations, make sense under the Shirky Principle and do not make sense otherwise. Today I want to take a look at another such concept: the cargo cult.

Outside of academia, the term “cargo cult” was popularized by Richard Feynman in 1974 commencement address at CalTech. He expounded on the concept in his 1985 book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (except copied from Wikipedia).

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

Before we continue with Feynman’s cargo cult science, let’s look at the concept as formulated in anthropology. According to Wikipedia, the first use of “cargo cult” in print can be traced to 1945 by Norris Mervyn Bird. The term is most associated (though not exclusively) with societies in Melanesia, following interactions with foreign civilizations operating in a poorly understood economic and political system. According to the article, cult leaders, failing to understand the principles of mass production, preached that the cargo on European sailing ships and later planes during World War II were in fact provided by their deceased ancestors and intended for the Melanesians, but was improperly intercepted by Europeans. Some cults dating from World War II, such as the John Frum movement in modern-day Vanuatu, still exist. Some anthropologists argue that the “cargo cult” label is both an oversimplification of certain Pacific Island religious movements and a pejorative label and thus that the term should be abandoned.

A cross from the John Frum cargo cult, 1967, in what is now Vanuatu. Image from Wikipedia.

With this context out of the way, I would boil down Feynman’s use of the “cargo cult” label to this most basic form.

A cargo cult is a system of practice that seems to replicate a condition by mimicking the outer forms of that condition. However, lacking an understanding of the condition, such efforts are unlikely to succeed.

In his description of cargo cult science, what is “something essential” that Feynman believes that many scientists are missing? His answer would be a genuine curiosity about the hypothesis in question. Cargo cult science, according to Feynman, proceeds with the goal of demonstrating a hypothesis, without any serious effort to disprove the hypothesis or investigate whether it is correct.

The concept is useful enough to be expanded to other fields. Cargo cult programming is a style of programming whereby novice programmers include code without understanding what it actually does, rationalizing the decision with logic such as “that’s how it has always been done”.

Steve McConnell coined the term “cargo cult software engineering”, referring to management of a software project. Management styles can come in one of two forms: a process-oriented approach that focuses on continually improving the software process, and a commitment-oriented approach that focuses on hiring talented people, granting them autonomy, and letting them work long hours. Both of these styles can be successful. But both can easily degenerate into management styles that superficially look similar but, failing to understand the underlying mechanism, are highly dysfunctional. Although McConnell writes in the context of software engineering, the concepts are applicable to any type of project.

Urbanist politics tend to revolve around aesthetics and lifestyle preferences, with the concept of “good urbanism” being built around those things, and thus urbanism is particularly prone to cargo cult thinking. Here Stephen Smith describes then Los Angeles councilmember José Huizar’s proposal for a downtown skyscraper mandate and one-way streetcar as “cargo cult urbanism”, mistaking the trappings of good urbanism for the substance. Here Kayla Gordon describes attempts to mandate high densities in exurban settings without the market to support them as “Cargo Cult Urbanism”. Here Matthew Robare describes New Urbanism broadly as Cargo Cult Urbanism, seeking to impose a lifestyle through planning. (All three of these articles are from 2013; that must have been a theme for the year.)

Bryan Caplan describes cargo cult thinking in communism, such as Mao Zedong’s campaign to maximize steel production in the Great Leap Forward.

Within the policy world, and within popular public discourse, there are numerous examples of cargo cult reasoning: ideas based on a lack of understanding on the causal factors at play. I’ll list some of them here. Most of these could be subjects for future posts, and I hope some of them will be. In some cases the premises are wrong; in some the premises are accurate but the conclusions do not follows; and in some cases the conclusions may be accurate but the reasoning is faulty.

• The “Sputnik Moment”. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957, it demonstrated that the United States was falling behind technologically, spurring the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (later DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), NASA, and the National Defense Education Act. For a geopolitical rival to the United States to make a major technological achievement (or appear to) today would similarly spur technological advancement in the U.S.

• The Apollo program, which culminated with the Apollo 11 landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969, inspired a generation of scientists and mathematicians. The Artemis program to return to the Moon or a possible crewed Mars mission would similarly inspire scientists and spur technological advancement.

• Major disasters, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor or the September 11 attacks, induce national unity. A similar disaster, though not to be desired in and of itself, would help heal the partisan divide (one post that has been on my to-do list for a long time would be entitled “The Myth of Post-9/11 Unity”).

• As a counterpoint to the above on cargo cult urbanism, suburbs are cheaper than urban cores, and therefore restricting density will lower housing prices.

• The United States has more expensive health care than most wealthy countries, and the United States has a greater role for the private sector in health care than most wealth countries, and so a single-payer health care system would reduce prices.

• There was less income inequality in the United States in the 1950s than today, and more workers were unionized in the 1950s than today, and so union-friendly legislation would reduce income inequality.

I could go on and on. The cargo cult is the kind of principle that, once understood, can be observed almost everywhere. To protect oneself from such errors of reasoning, it is necessary to reason things from first principles and avoid relying heavily on heuristics such as analogy, historical precedent, or “that’s what successful people do”.

Quick Hits

There was a coup in Gabon this week, the eighth in west or central Africa since 2020 and not long after a coup in Niger. There are signs of irregularities in that country’s recent presidential election, which was the pretext for the coup. Regardless, it is yet another worrying sign of instability in Africa.

Two years after the withdrawal, Abigail Houseal reports on the Afghan Adjustment Act. The bill would streamline the visa process for Afghans who assisted the United States during the war, often at great risk to their lives.

CaspianReport (Shirvan Neftchi) has a profile on Poland’s defense spending. Historically, Poland has been vulnerable to attack, and they have been possibly the most outspoken country in NATO about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Poland is aiming to spend 4% of GDP on defense, the most of any NATO country and twice the level expected by NATO.

Bill Richardson died yesterday at age 75. Richardson was UN Ambassador and Secretary of Energy under Bill Clinton and the governor of New Mexico from 2003 to 2011. Richardson ran for president in 2008 and was one my favorite candidates at the time, but his reputation has been tarnished by a number of scandals.