My native language is Ewe. The words we usually use for caucasian people is "yo vo".It's an evolution of an archaic pronunciation used today by only a few, "ye vu", and it was brought to my attention recently that it means "cunning dog".Ye=cunning, Vu=dog.

Explanation: we kinda didn't start on a good footing with the Germans back in the day ... So today most people will call every white person "cunning dog" without even knowing or meaning harm because the dialect has evolved. On one hand, for most people, it's just a random word with no insulting connotation; you try to make them switch to some another term, you're crazy dumb woke etc. On the other hand, I know I would take offense in being called that even if I'm told the word's lost the original meaning a long time ago.

Personally I don't know where the middle ground should be. But some "retroactive policing of language" is definitely needed. It may seem mundane to you, but sometimes these kind of things can be unsavory to other people. With globalization, it's not you and your pals anymore ...

In 50 years or so, people will just say the next round of terms is insensitive, especially as language continues to change and evolve, and repeat on forever.

You can "decimate" something without actually killing 1/10th of the people involved, and you can call some people "yo vo" without meaning they are cunning dogs.

Even your username is a ~Yiddish~ (edit: Hebrew, thank you, ars) word Jewish people use for non-Jewish people (sometimes derogatory, maybe). There's no end to this rabbit hole.

Judge people by their intentions behind what they say, not some etymological trivia.

Personally, I don't like the term from my language not only because of the possible reception but also it doesn't feel right to use it.

Also I'd only use it to say goodbye, only Italians use it to say hello, and you have to feel superior to someone!

Because that would seem an important thing to ascertain.

I don't want to condemn your thoughts/feelings on this as I'm clearly not familiar with the specific situation, but I think what people are getting at is that imagining that other people may be offended by words and then policing based on that seems like moral posturing and trying to change people's habits for very little reason. If you take into account that (for the most part) the users of those words/idioms don't actually mean the 'bad' meaning, it all seems ... pointless. An action to make an in-group feel superior to an out-group, but that doesn't actually make any difference.

It sometimes reminds me of the (very middle class) campaign that took place in the UK in the last decade to stop people feeding bread to ducks, swans and other waterfowl. Well meaning, virtuous people took to putting up home-made signs about it at popular spots, and to intervening and even shaming those that continued the centuries old tradition. Pictures of swans with wing conditions were often used to try to shock.

While there is truth to the idea that there are better things you can feed ducks (oats, leafy greens), eventually the royal master of swans and a well-respected professor of ornithology got together and put out a statement begging people not to stop. Bread does no detectable harm to the birds, there is no known link to the medical conditions and it forms an important source of calories for many populations over winter. But the signs and the behaviour don't really stop, because it gives some people a way to look down on others, to signal that they know and those other idiots are just awful.

On the one hand, someone might appreciate that you are demonstrating care for how much something might hurt for them to think about in a certain way.

On the other hand, someone might take it as an insult that you don't think they can handle thinking about that thing in that way.

Assuming either one without knowing your audience is easily folly, but the "recovery" from each is different.

If you had to group into Caucasoid, Negroid or Mongoloid your likely choose the first one, but I'd say it's better not to work on the basis of 18th century "racial theory".

However, I don't usually make a fuss about the term, because I know a great many people use the term to mean "white" and aren't thinking about the relative merits of the three races of man. It's just a word to many people and it serves well enough in that context.

Mike Tyson was convicted of rape, so I assume you are opposed to Mike Tyson and "promoting" him in any way. In your actions, I assume you refused to discuss the most recent Tyson vs Paul fight, and noted, calmly, cooly, to anyone mentioning it that "Mike Tyson is a convicted rapist, and I don't promote rapists."

That's very reasonable.

Martha Steward was convicted of insider trading. I think that could be called a kind of corruption. I assume you refuse to purchase any of her products, use her cooking recipes, and so on. When her name is mentioned you cooly, calmy, note to anyone listening that "Martha Stewart is a convicted felon, convicted of insider trading. I refuse to promote her in any way".

Ok, that seems reasonable too.

But there are some "edgy" cases, maybe, like what about Mel Gibson, who while drunk and under arrest went on a racist rant. Do you reject all Mel Gibson movies and cooly, calmy note to everyone that "Mel Gibson is a racist, and I don't promote racism" when the Mad Max or Lethal Weapon franchises are mentioned? Despite his objectionable drunken rant, he doesn't appear to have acted on his statements that I'm aware of, nor repeated them while sober (quite the opposite).

Are you rejecting people for their opinions about rape, corruption, and racism or their actions?

Gandhi, for example, was said to have used racial epithets for some groups. Is Gandhi a racist? And Henry Ford wrote a lengthy book considered racist. Do you reject the Ford Motor Company (and many existing German auto makers have unfortunate links to the German nationalists of WW2)?

There are similar cases around accusations of corruption, rape/sexual assault, and so on: sometimes they aren't convicted, sometimes they are let free. Look at Bill Cosby. He was convicted and it appears let free, but on a technicality.

Do you reject all discussion of The Fat Albert Show and The Cosby Show because of Bill Cosby's rape conviction? Joe Biden and more recently Sam Altman have been accused of sexual misconduct. Do you reject them too? Is a conviction enough or is a #metoo accusation sufficient?

Made his fortune from punching people in the head, so that is such a weird example of a person that you are expecting others to empathise with or support. A whole lot of people find sports that result in brain injuries to be pretty distasteful.

That people choose to find it distasteful is fine with me.

I'm talking about Mike Tyson, the convicted rapist, not Mike Tyson as a boxer.

Just a reminder to never talk to the FBI without a lawyer

Hmmm

"The grand jury returned an indictment on June 4, 2003, charging Stewart with conspiracy, obstruction of justice, making false statements, and securities fraud." https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/...

I think she beat "securities fraud", but was convicted on conspiracy, obstruction, and making false statements:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040307121033/https://money.cnn...

So, yeah, technically she didn't get convicted of insider trading/securities fraud, but managed a felony conviction around the charges.

Good catch. So I guess we can't easily dismiss Martha from our category of people we refuse to promote.

Anyone promoting Bill Cosby the person is definitely doing something questionable, which is the relevant point.

I'm bringing up Ford and Gandhi because I think they're generally considered respectable, but could be accused of being in the category of those to "shun" based on verbal statements or opinions. I am not aware that either did anything. Are we shunning people because they've advocated opinions that in their time weren't controversial, but are now?

Bill Cosby's conviction was overturned on a technicality. Do we shun him even if the courts couldn't/didn't convict him?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/why-bill-cosbys-conviction...

Or similarly, "unconvicted" but alleged unsavory characters, perhaps pop musicians, TV hosts, presidents, presidential candidates, and so on.

Do you just shun everyone who has simply been accused of misconduct? What if the accusers recant or are found to be lying? It's happened.

Crystal Mangum, now incarcerated for murder, has recanted her rape accusation against the Duke la crosse players:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/woman-falsely-accused-duke-lacros...

> Bill Cosby's conviction was overturned on a technicality. Do we shun him even if the courts couldn't/didn't convict him?

Yes, the public is well entitled to shun him on the basis of what he did indeed confess to .. that is entirely orthogonal to that confession being rejected on a technicality and thus not being part of a formal legal conviction.

https://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/07/us/bill-cosby-quaaludes-s...

So he appears to have confessed at least to be a drug dealer.

With Cosby's testimony included he was convicted, it and the womens testimonies were found to be sufficient under law to demonstrate guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

When the testimony was excluded on technical grounds the statements by Cosby weren't demonstrated to be false or questioned in any way, they were simply set aside, as true as they ever were.

Again, the general public is entitled to shun Cosby on the basis of the testimonies presented including his own words which haven't been discredited, just excluded.

But my point is not the minutiae of Cosby's trial, but that he is "unconvicted" - and if you want to claim to not encourage rapists/murderers/the corrupt are we talking about:

1. THE CONVICTED: people who have been convicted of these felonious crimes (e.g. Stewart, Tyson, ),

2. THE UNCONVICTED: unconvicted people who have made statements relating to these crimes, which may not even be crimes in their country or era (Cosby, Ford, Gandhi), or

3. THE ACCUSED: people who have simply been accused of these crimes (i.e. #metoo or other public accusations with no conviction and public denials, Woody Allen, Sam Altman, etc)

False dilemma. No one who ever mentioned the term "cargo cult" is endorsing oppression or promoting rapists, corruption, racists, or any nonsense of this sort.

In fact, your comment reads a lot like a thinly veiled blanked and baseless accusation on anyone who disagrees with a silly hypothesis.

The concept has a very specific meaning in tech circles. No one who uses it is even holding in mind anything related to Melanesia. You can waste as much time as you'd like on virtue signaling by championing a "master-slave vs leader-follower" rebranding, but it's a matter of time before someone out-virtues you and figures out how to frame your own PC term as oppressive. It's exhausting.

> No one who ever mentioned the term "cargo cult" is endorsing oppression or promoting rapists, corruption, racists, or any nonsense of this sort.

doesn't work, as you don't have sources for that.

> No one who uses it is even holding in mind anything related to Melanesia.

Which is the whole point of the article, to give you background.

In the same way that some newspapers have listed "rawdogging" as one of their words of the year, saying "oh its ok you can use this" but neatly forgets to mention what the word _still_ means to a sizeable number of people.

> figures out how to frame your own PC term as oppressive. It's exhausting.

Come on. oppressive? The entire world of corporations is oppressive. You need to conform to not be fired. The "In" words change all the time. The list of banned phrases changes monthly. thats normally down to the whims of just a small bunch of people in the c-suite. If you transgress, you're yeeted out.

That is oppression, not voluntarily reading article that makes you sad.

Stuff like that is exactly what's so dangerous with virtue signaling: It leads to conflating tiny, or possibly non-existent, infractions with serious evil. I'm sure you didn't mean to say people who talk about "cargo cult programming" are corrupt racists and rapists, did you? Or that they promote corruption, racism, and rape?

Maybe you should have tried to find a way to express yourself that didn't make it sound quite so much like that was what you were saying. Or, you know, if this virtue-signaling article didn't exist, this discussion wouldn't exist either, and then you wouldn't have said it.

Virtue signaling is not driven by effectiveness but by the effort it takes for you to one-up people around you with a holier-than-thou attitude.

In fact, I would go as far as to argue that the point of virtue signaling is to be the least effective as possible, as to maximize the opportunities to one-up people and stand out.

I think you're getting pushback for these reasons:

1. The times, they are a-changing. The title and conclusion of the article (whilst mild) are telling people not to use an otherwise useful phrase because it might be offensive to Micronesians.

2. Some of the conclusions seem on fragile ground honestly, despite how well researched they are. You start by claiming that Feynman misrepresented cargo cults because he watched a bad movie, but then give lots of examples of tribes doing the exact things he talked about. You even present photos of a "radio tower", mention a "radio" that was just a woman wrapped in wire and other such fake objects.

Feynmann's point was actually an important one about science, not Melanesian tribes. That was just a hook to get students to listen, just like how you used the famous physicist as a hook to get people to read your article. But I'm struggling to see where the inaccuracy is here. Given he spent only a few sentences on it, he did seem to correctly summarize what cargo cults are and the fact that some of them pre-date WW2 and talk about ships is really neither here nor there.

3. There is a strong overtone here of "European settlers were bad and wrong and cargo cults wouldn't exist if they hadn't turned up", which is unsupportable. These were people who started suffered a horrible prion disease because they engaged in cannibalism, something the nasty Europeans put a swift end to everywhere they took control. Their garbled belief systems about good stuff appearing when they get the rituals right weren't caused by Christianity, which is why they had to imagine that the Bibles they'd been given were incomplete to try and make it fit with their pre-existing ideas. In fact the Old Testament explicitly forbids exactly the kind of idolatry they were engaged in, leading to the interesting thought that maybe that rule evolved because it lends itself to self-destructive ritualism and cargo cult-like thinking. Christianity also forbids many other self-destructive ideas often found in isolated tribes, like human sacrifice and inter-tribal warring. If so it would seem like Christianity is the fix, not the cause.

4. The semantic drift in how people use the term seems small. Cargo cult programming doesn't work, that's the reason it's criticized. Given enough copy/pasting from Stack Overflow you might get something that superficially looks right, just like with enough work you can make an airport out of bamboo that looks right, but it won't actually meet its spec for functioning correctly because important stuff will be missing.

Whilst you certainly succeed in making the point that cargo cults were a more complex phenomenon than what Feynman presented in his brief intro, I didn't come away convinced that the metaphor is misused.

> Given enough copy/pasting from Stack Overflow you might get something that superficially looks right, just like with enough work you can make an airport out of bamboo that looks right, but it won't actually meet its spec for functioning correctly because important stuff will be missing.

There’s plenty of code that just works despite not meeting the spec, though. The allegation of cargo culting is levied against empty formalities that betray a misunderstanding of why something works or not. There are plenty of tales in software of “load-bearing code” and lines lost to faded tribal knowledge and even magic comments that are not to be removed because somehow they keep the end program functioning.

The signaling is just pointing it out to make yourself look better, it doesn’t mean you’re lying.

> It seems like you'ld have to have access to their mental state, no

Of course, absent communication, that would be the only way. Fortunately, communication - such as written text - allows us to let others to witness certain aspects of our mental state, this is one of the points of communication. So, present the communication, we can make certain conclusions about the mental state of the communicator.

Non constructive noise from creatures with desire only to chase something.

For example: "spook" was allegedly used at some point as a slur against black people, so if you have ever used the term "spooky" in a Hallowe'en context you have committed the immortal sin of doing a structural racism.

To the underemployed university administrative staff who have never experienced real hardships, this sort of thing is a Big Deal(tm), except we can't call it that because it's insensitive to short people. Correction: people experiencing heightlessness.

To this, I call out the case of the words Spanish speakers have been using to refer to disabled persons.

The word for "disabled person" was at a point in time deemed too insensitive and an outright insult, so around the 1970s the word "subnormal" started showing up even in government acts to appease the virtue signaling crowd.

Except that after a few years the word "subnormal" also managed to find itself as a prime example of a gross PC violation, and therefore they coined the term "minusválido" (i.e., "less than valid", a milder form of "invalid") to appease the PC gods.

But lo and behold, "minusválido" is now also looked poorly by the PC crowd as being offensive.

https://languageacts.org/loaded-meanings/schools-teachers/ri...

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/euphemism_treadmill

How à propos, because in English "disabled" is no longer acceptable and they now demand that you say "differently-abled".

I mean hell it's not even a less accurate description, you're not able to walk but you're able to move around using crutches or a wheelchair or other mobility device. A person who isn't able to walk may still be able to do almost everything day to day (well aside from walking) that a non-disabled (or non-differently abled person, ok that sounds kinda weird) person would be able to, albeit in a different way.

It feels… inconsequential.

These are the same people who publish "inclusive language guides" with garbage like "don't use the term Brainwave because it's dehumanizing to people with intellectual disabilities".

It's an entire R&D field dedicated to finding new and creative ways to be offended.

In reality: people have opinions, and they can be different. That's fine.

And "wokeism" aside, he gives a good obscure-history lesson as to why the phrase "cargo cult" doesn't actually mean what most of us think it does. That itself made it worth a read for me.

He's skipping Twitter and jumped straight to hectoring people, going to the extent of even casting blanket criticism on the points being made by anyone using the metaphor.

Did the author make this article compulsory?

Did the author force Hacker News to put this on the front page?

Did the author threaten to sack you if you didn't read, understand and comply with the article?

Freedom of speech means that you will see things that you disagree with. But to conflate seeing an article in a _pull_ model, ie a title that you have to click on as hectoring people seems a bit, well far.

Its not like its a twitter pile on, this seems like a well reasoned, researched article with sited sources. Even if you don't agree with the outcomes.

He personally may not. We do know though there are a lot of people very eager to wage such campaigns, and we know speech-policing campaigns have very real and very far reaching consequences sometimes. So the sensitivity to such things is heightened right now. And I am sure that if the "rambling on his personal blog" contained some things that are considered culturally unacceptable (something like Damore memo, for example), there would be a lot of people who would call not only for widespread discussion but for suppression and deplatforming of the person expressing it. I think this is extremely wrong approach, regardless of the content, but I think also this may be the reason why discussing this seriously is an appropriate reaction. To be clear, I do not call (and I am extremely opposed to) attacking the person writing it in any way. But I think it deserves the pushback - in the form of discussion and critique - that it is getting. Language policing and censorship is very real, very dangerous and should be discussed and pushed back against.

> he gives a good obscure-history lesson as to why the phrase "cargo cult" doesn't actually mean what most of us think it does.

I am not sure that's actually true. Most of us probably thinks cargo cult is a religions practice somewhere in the Pacific that mimics external looks of the logistical operations performed by Westerners on their islands to expect the results of coming of goods that the Westerners brought in (cargo), without understanding what caused the actual logistic processes to happen and how they work, just by magic means. Most of us would probably have the specific details wrong, but that's true for almost every area. The article provided very good plenty of details, very interesting - but with all the "akshually"-ing there, I don't think it has proven the main premise wrong. The information itself is very much appreciated, but I don't think the conclusion - which seems to be "you are all wrong and should stop using this term" - is warranted.

You might find them annoying, but these people "yelling at clouds" in their personal blogs are actually refreshing when all you see around are people leaning towards repeating the darkest part of our collective history.

I read the post as the author decribing facts and imparting instructions of what we should do ("It's time to do X", "The cargo cult metaphor should be avoided") because they believe their knowledge/opinions/morals/beliefs are better than mine, and somehow they can dictate what to do; how should I feel, what should I think.

Otherwise I am oppressing, contributing to oppress, perpetuating something, [insert other accusations].

As in the past 15 years. It's enough already.

The real question is why the author is doing this? Is it ego? Money? Clicks? Pure and true altruism?

And here "virtue signalling" comes as a possible valid answer too.

The problem with saying it's virtue signaling is that when you resort to ad hominem attacks, you're conceding the argument. Attacking character concedes the argument being made. Well I don't concede. I have a good argument against it. My argument is that nobody cares about the etymology or morality of a word. They care about its meaning and context. People don't learn language by reading etymologies. Nobody cares one way or the other about the morality of the first person who said it or popularized it especially if it happened a hundred years ago. We don't need to look up the etymology of every word or phrase before using it, and asking people to do that is unrealistic and unreasonable.

Is it virtue signaling? I don't know, and I don't care. His character doesn't matter to me. It doesn't affect whether or not his idea is a good one. It's a bad idea, and leave it there.

And doesn't matter if it was written in a blog.

Pablo Escobar could say that he understand his values (whatever they were; maybe money and power over all other values?) and that he works to apply them every day. He advocated for his own values and morals (ruthlessly). This doesn't make him an Ethical person.

And more to the point, you're not believable. Are you really going to say that because Pablo Escobar may have had a set of values and acted on those values, we have to throw away that whole idea?

Hitler was really fond of his pet dog, does having a pet dog make someone evil?

In any case, here's what I dislike about your original comment, and what it seems to express.

Instead of engaging with the ideas and values presented in the article, you feel back on attacking the very idea of expressing ideas and values. You know that's a ridiculous position, I know you do, but it's easier to do that than it is to actually engage.

Depends. Have you heard of the terms or phrases "preachy"? "Holier-than-thou"? "Pearl-clutching"? "Making mountains out of molehills"? "Language police"? "White knighting"? "Misapplied effort"? "Professionally offended"?

Are those positive?

And who gets to decide what's "bad behavior" and what's merely use of an old term? Based on what? Their feelings that use of the term offends someone from some group that they themselves don't belong to and have probably never even talked to IRL? That it's use implies some intend? That certain practices of some groups can't be referenced as a name, if those groups have had a sorry past? That the only ethnic people who use such terms are just the ex-opressors of said group, and not also people who have been themselves colonized or opressed? Does he think e.g. Jewish or Latin American or African developers don't use such terms too to describe the notion?

L-1) There's a purely informational layer, where he's talking about the meaning and history of the phrase "cargo cult."

L-2) There's an logical layer, where he attempts to use the information presented to persuade the reader to (not) modify their beliefs, feelings, or actions in some way.

L-3) There's an attitude layer, which involves the way he addresses the reader, his "virtue signaling," the quality of his writing, his overall tone.

(In another situation I might also consider:

L-4) The presentation layer, which involves the look of the website, its responsiveness, etc.)

In my opinion generally information should be most important, and then we look at the logic, and last but least consider the attitude. But I feel like increasingly in society we look at the attitude and if it turns us off, we summarily discard the entire thing, or even take an opposing view on principle. Even if the information and logic is sound. Hence the bulk of the comments here dismissing what he's saying out of hand because essentially it's too woke.

So my answer is that even conceding that the things you mention ("preachy" "holier-than-thou" etc.) are negative, ideally we ought to be able to critique just that layer without discarding the rest of the communication.

EDIT: Responding to your edit, I think he has no more or less right to decide what's good or bad than anyone else. Just because he's saying we ought to reject the phrase doesn't mean we have to actually do it, so I don't feel personally offended or enraged by his exhortation.

So, it makes sense that the thing the author prioritizes and focuses on will be criticized. Would many be criticizing a historical article on the origins of the term, or the plights of the people it covers?

Collective consensus.

But that doesn't mean the author is not entitled to have an opinion and express it.

The commenters who dislike the general tone are of course entitled to express that, however, it is baffling to me that the argument is that Author is entitled to their opinion and the commenters who disagree should not comment.

>> And who gets to decide what's "bad behavior" >Collective consensus.

I know this is generally the way of things however, I dislike this as it is mob rule.

In the same way that I hate K8s networking.

Your side won. Is that not enough for you? What more do you want?

Apparently, "they" will moan loudly about being silenced until everyone else has stopped saying things they don't like.

(using "they" as a vague, undefined term, after seeing such a widespread use of "we" in this thread).

Silenced requires a someone to take active steps to do the silencing. At best this is just people choosing to not listen. If you want the blue tribe jab it's got to be something like "they will keep trying to call everyone racists until people stop saying thing they don't like."

What kind of "evidence" beyond the content of the signalling itself it would require? I mean, sure one could make a detailed critique of the article to show why exactly it fits the term very well (TLDR version would be it tries to police the well-understood usage of the term that describes real phenomenon and is useful to prevent imaginary offenses) but it wouldn't be "evidence" - it does not introduce any new facts, only one's opinion. The only factual "evidence" necessary is the content of the article, which is already here.

> Is that not enough for you?

Not even beginning to be close to being enough. Winning would be going back to the times where you can discuss political topic without fear of your life being ruined and your livelihood being taken away from you. Winning would be where there aren't thousands of people actively searching to hurt other people for disagreeing with them. Winning would be not having dozens of people in a lot of corporations specifically paid obscene money for pushing idpol. Winning would be forgetting the meaning of the word "cancelled" that we learned in the last decade. Winning would be for the culture to change so that trying to hurt people for disagreeing would be shameful, not praised. We may have hope for it to happen one day, but we're not even close to being true now. It may take years or decades - just it it took decades for "woke nonsense" to take root in the culture - and may very well not happen at all, any election results nonwithstanding.

"Virtue signaling" means someone is acting only to signal their own virtue, and not because they actually believe in the thing they are doing or expressing.

There is no evidence of that.

[Emphasis altered -- CRC.]

Really? I never knew it had to be a necessary part of it, that they don't believe in [whatever]. Are you sure that's part of the general definition, and not just something you made up?

Even if you do believe in something, if you keep preening yourself in sanctimony about how virtuous you are for believing in it -- what is that, then, if not virtue signaling?

So, because of that I went and checked the definition. Merriam says:

> : the act or practice of conspicuously displaying one's awareness of and attentiveness to political issues, matters of social and racial justice, etc., especially instead of taking effective action

So I learned something today, that virtue signalling can refer to political issues. I guess on this side of the pond I was more used to it applying to social posturing.

Anyway, that being said, I do feel that the "two party" thing you guys have going there is leading to this increased polarisation and radicalisation, especially online. If you think someone using "virtue signalling" is "attacking your side", you're literally viewing them as "the enemy". "Your side won". That can't be healthy for you. There's a lot of nuance between "your side" and "their side".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15069187

The number of upvotes (and, presumably, vouches) for the article suggest that you’re in a bubble.

Instead of getting offended, consider this an opportunity to be intellectually curious and learn some interesting history.

I mean, yes, there is probably a more pressing cause, a worthier cause, a more effective way to bring about change if the guy cares about the issue of colonialism or something. So what? There's always a worthier or more pressing cause or arguably a better way to pursue it than [x].

If you care about something, that's your cause. You don't need to justify it by establishing that your commitment to it accurately reflects its place in the triaged hierarchy of capital-i issues.

It's also possible to care about more than one thing at a time.

So if this is the guy's cause, that's fine. He doesn't need to devote himself to something worthier or demonstrate that the energy he expends on it is well spent.

That being said, his criticism of the metaphor and his prescription both strike me as not just nonsense but backwards. Providing historical context shows, if anything, that "cargo cult" as a metaphor is historically accurate, especially in the sense in which engineers use it: cargo cult engineering practices are those that their believers are convinced will help usher in some desired future, but the basis of those practices is sheer superstition.

And the fact that there is a story, in the context of actual, historical cargo cults, to be told about exploitation or subjugation is, again, an irrelevant, empty truism. Almost every grass-roots religious movement can be interpreted this way. And in areas that were under colonial or authoritarian rule, one would be hard pressed to find social and religious movements that don't in one way or another respond to those conditions.

So the author's historical analysis is sophomoric, like the guy has just discovered oppression and really wants to raise the alarm about it. The resulting prescription is empty, lame, and tedious.

Sanctifying the oppressed this way is also weirdly tone deaf and condescending. Nobody's asking us to protect the subaltern religious movements of southeast Asia, nobody's belittling them, and nobody cares, except the author, apparently, who for some strange reason is filing complaints on their behalf.

In your opinion, exactly what's the cause in this case?

"It's time to abandon the cargo cult metaphor"

The problem is that there is nothing being corrected at all. There's only a poorly framed and distorted interpretation of the coloquial use of an expression, which is then exaggerated to serve as a basis for virtue signaling.

The blogger goes to the extent of trying to dismiss any argument that ever refers to the concept as "simply a lazy, meaningless attack". As if anyone who refers to a specific concept is automatically wrong by means of commiting a foul in a virtue signaling game.

> Note that the metaphor in cargo-cult programming is the opposite of the metaphor in cargo-cult science: Feyman's cargo-cult science has no chance of working, while cargo-cult programming works but isn't understood. Moreover, both metaphors differ from the cargo-cult metaphor in other contexts, referring to the expectation of receiving valuables without working.

So there's some justification that the meaning has escaped the metaphor and has become meaningless.

Also, it's quite ironic that arguably the term "virtue signaling" has itself become a lazy, meaningless attack- a cargo cult, in other words. Claims of virtue signaling - both as a rhetorical activity, and as an insult devised to shut down discourse- are both cargo cults.

> (...) Feyman's cargo-cult science has no chance of working, while cargo-cult programming works but isn't understood.

Cargo-cult science does not work because by "work" it would need to involve causality, which it doesn't.

This is not the same as the cargo-cult mentality referred to in tech circles. That refers only to the belief that the performative aspect correlated to an expected outcome is actually the cause, whereas it's at best a correlation. People build landing strips expecting cargo planes to drop off riches. People use a specific project tree layout expecting the project to work. People use a programming language expecting their code to be memory safe and vulnerability-free. People use a container orchestration service expecting their system to be highly scalable and resilient. People use a framework expecting their system to be high performance and efficient.

You'll see claims that "this app runs on Kubernetes, thus is very resilient and highly scalable". Cargo cult mentality.

Do you understand why the "lazy, meaningless attack" remark makes absolutely no sense when actually considering the concept?

There is no justification. There's only a straw man based on, at best, a gross failure to understand the very basis of concept that's being criticized.

Not to mention that since "cargo cult engineering" badly misstates what cargo cults were, it's not even a good metaphor! You need to have two different definitions of "cargo cult": the real life one, and Feynman's childish fairy tale. Just say something else!

I will add that the frog thing is also a terrible metaphor! Since frogs don't actually behave this way, saying "these people are like frogs in a boiling pot" is tantamount to saying "these people are intelligent enough to leave when the situation gets bad." Again you have to use two different mental models: actual frogs, and a childish fairy tale. And note what happens if someone hasn't heard the boiling frogs thing: they are told the lie as if it were true. Just like with cargo cults - everyone hears Feynman first, and only later do a small segment learn that Feynman was wrong. These "metaphors" spread ignorance, and it's completely avoidable. We are grown adults and we can simply phrase our points in different ways. We don't have to rely on idiotic stories and lying to each other.

I'm not sure you and I even have the same understanding of the term., since I wouldn't have said it was equivalent to snake oil or alchemy. My interpretation is that it relates to trying to reproduce success by mimicking some (apparent) cause, while in fact not understanding the underlying mechanism, and hence failing.

If you distilled the Feynman story into something like this:

"There was a society inhabiting a remote island, who had little or no contact with the outside world. At some point a much larger and richer society sets up an airstrip on the island and gathers supplies. They share these supplies with the locals and due to the relative wealth disparity it is a significant improvement to their quality of life. The foreigners eventually leave and the supplies stop, and so the locals try to replicate the prior conditions. This makes sense, but since they have relatively little knowledge of aircraft or geopolitics the only information they have to work with is what they saw at the airstrip. Their efforts are doomed because they lack the requisite deeper understanding."

Now you and I know that this is a gross simplification and neglects a religious aspect, the anthropology-goggles of whoever reported the effects in the west, the many disparate groups that have been labelled "cargo cults" in recent history, the local economic and social conditions, etc. I think a reasonable person can understand that it's just a little fable inspired by genuine events, and that it serves to illustrate an idea. It shouldn't be used to make a judgement about the people involved or global conflict or human nature, except as a small piece taken with all the relevant historiographical context.

Stories like these are IMHO an effective way to spread and label ideas, so that if my PHB buys ping pong tables because he wants to have a share price like Google's then I can say "cargo cult" rather than explaining the whole concept, because I understand that my colleagues will know what I'm referring to.

I applaud your effort to stand up for people you feel are being unfairly maligned, but I think that you can use the metaphor without lying or promoting ignorance.

At the time, I was unaware of this term, and the explanation given to me was the "misunderstood" one, as explained in the article.

Since that incident, I, too, have pointed out patterns of "cargo culting" as/when I identified them. Not too many, but definitely more than a couple. More than once, I've repeated the same explanation. I've even used the "misunderstood" explanation as a fun anecdote to share at gatherings (both work, and social).

While I don't think less of the original person for referring to my team as a cargo cult (they were sincere in their criticism), the article will definitely stop me from using the misunderstood version of events as the "true" origin of the term. It will change the way I speak about it, even if I refer to this term in the future.

For that, I am grateful.

That's absolutely fair and if that had been there point of the article, I'd be 100% behind it. I love learning new things about words and phrases. Etymology is my jam.

But no. That wasn't the point of the article. It's saying "you are wrong, you should feel bad, you're not allowed to use the thing you were wrong about anymore". I generally fall quite far on the left, politically. But when people talk about "woke nonsense", this is the kind of thing where I find myself agreeing with them, much as I did a couple of years ago when we were all socially pressured into renaming our "master" branches to "main" branches.

And really, you're bothered by the idea that 'main' is a more neutral name for the default branch of a git repository, and want to cling to 'master', when that term has traditionally been used to describe someone who enslaves other humans? Really? You're that attached to something like a default branch name in a VCS? Or you aren't, but because it sounded like people were trying to make you feel bad about yourself for using 'master', you're just going to be obstinate and own those libs?

All that seems kinda spiteful and petty. You do you, I guess.

No, that's the complete opposite of what I said.

Please read again. The part where I said that the underlying message is "you are wrong, you should feel bad, you're not allowed to use the thing you were wrong about anymore".

If the message had been "you're wrong about something, here's the truth, now make up your own mind about whether you want to keep using it", I'd be completely on board with the article. My decision would probably be that I'm gonna keep using the phrase because all of linguistics is built on misunderstandings, mistranslations, and downright lies, so avoiding every phrase that has "bad" origins is a step on the road to 1984. But that's just like, my opinion, man. You can decide otherwise and we can all get along just fine.

This sort of phrasing of one’s opinion is as old as essays and speeches themselves, as far as I know. Here is an english translation of a speech by Cicero, the one from which our good old lorem ipsum placeholder text was derived.

https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cicero/de...

Of course it is sensible for a person to have an opinion on the conduct of others, and to express that opinion. Where is the problem?

Unless said author was in a position of power over me I would understand the “we should X” phrasing as kind of like… the standard way that opinions have been expressed throughout history…

   "I think that people should do XYZ"

The reader knows that this is your opinion. They may reasonably presume these are your opinions and that you are not writing the essay at gunpoint or while under the influence of alien mind control. Furthermore, no reasonable reader would mistake your opinion for some sort of imperative they are compelled to obey.

(Now, I hope this isn't misconstrued to mean that all opinions should be expressed authoritatively and imperatively. That is not always the right tone.)

(I see from your comment history that you've talked about Typescript, and being Irish. Does that mean you don't actually write Typescript and you're, uh, not being Irish in a proper enough way? No.)

It's acceptable to discuss a societal issue even if you're not actively doing something about it. There are a lot of things going on in the world and a finite amount of hours in one's day. We can only personally reach out and touch a depressingly small subset of them. I think Putin is a rather malignant head of state, but I am not actively working to depose him, and I don't see a conflict there as long as I'm clear about that.

    deciding that they need to "help" minorities that they've 
    never met in some way, usually by policing language or fashion.

As an admittedly contrived example, suppose we work at a majority-white company where white employees are openly using racial slurs against black employees. As a white person, I've got a responsibility to confront this and steer things in a better direction. If I'm in management then part of my job is to shape enact and enforce policies to keep this from happening.

I think we'd agree on that cartoonishly obvious example, but another key belief is that there are a lot of "lesser" racist acts that may not be as egregious as the "n word" but are still well worth combating.

Certainly, I think that any particular policy at any company is up for discussion. I've no doubt there's a lot of overreach in this area. Some companies are surely doing real shitty jobs, but the problem here is "companies doing real shitty jobs" and not the core idea of "hey, let's shape a good company culture here."

But I think you are making a lot of other unsupported assumptions: that these policies are enacted by "rich white people" with zero input from the groups they claim to protect, and that these policies are being enacted without other more material changes, and so on. Again: surely true in some cases, but I believe you are conflating bad implementations with bad ideas.

I think you'ce misunderstood me here. I strongly believe in positive, progressive social change, and I strongly believe that in a large part this has to come from the dominant section of society.

The issue I have here is with frivolous linguistic change wrapped up as real social change.

These SJWs, or whatever you want to call them, are essentially role playing at social change.

I will highlight again that I don't think these are all rich white Americans, just that that is where the movement originated.

Sure, they can force through a minor change (often entirely incorrect, in the case of master branch having anything to do with slavery, or deciding that latinos should be referred to as latinx even though the actual latinos seem to largely deride this term).

But that does exactly zero to improve anyone's lives, except for these few already mostly privileged SJWs who get to pat themselves on the back.

Meanwhile, the main actual change that has happened is that loads of people - potential allies - have been frustrated or even alienated by this whole foolish endeavor, and society as a whole has shifted a step to the right.

I don't like arbitrary language policing, either. I think there was a much stronger case for eliminating "master"/"slave" than "master branch", for instance, and if people were to argue for eliminating "mastery" as well I'd consider that ridiculous. It's fine if you don't consider this particular argument persuasive, but if it's a step toward Ingsoc we've all already been sprinting in that direction for centuries.

Thankfully, there are many countries outside the US where this sort of 1984-style language policing is not accepted and we'll continue "clinging" to our "legacy terms", tyvm.

Why don’t we spend energy on getting to the issues we actually care about instead of standing on shaky arguments and calling it a day. It’s lazy thinking.

_late Old English mægester "a man having control or authority over a place; a teacher or tutor of children," from Latin magister (n.) "chief, head, director, teacher"_

So if we dislike the user of master, do we ban whip? Or any other term negatively associated with slavery that actually predates it? I think the actual answer is contextual, and in the context of git, there is no relation to slavery whatsoever for most of the worlds populace

The reason: because it was easier, it allowed corporations (especially Microsoft) to give the appearance of making social change, and because it distracted us from dealing with the real issues. In other words, laziness.

And you know what, if you're firmly on the progressive left, as I am, that's no big deal. It's annoying, maybe it alienates me from taking part in social action. But it won't, for example, change who I vote for.

However, we (the West) live in a period of history balanced on a narrow edge between social progression and social regression, with all manner of bad actors waiting on the wings to take advantage of our slipups. And this was a slipup, no matter how well meaning the people who pushed it through were. This, and many, many other small annoyances, were in all likelihood what it took to push a significant number of people to change their vote in the recent election. It's not the only reason, perhaps not even the main one. But any change is significant when you're balanced on an edge.

There is nothing progressive about any of that.

I also recognize that in all of these things, balance and nuance are required and conflicts are common and won't always be resolved in a way that makes me, personally, satisfied.

> forcing language

This entire thread is a majority of people, on a generally quite progressive forum, arguing strongly against forced language change. I do not believe that the majority of genuinely progressive people want or believe in forced language changes, with the exception of a few specific ethnic and gender based slurs.

Thanks for making my point.

But also, small things do have to change. If nothing changes, the status quo remains, and the status quo is stacked against many people. (Because of gender, race, culture, wealth, location, etc). It's easy to say "focus on the big things" but the small things can change along the way too.

I'm strongly in favor of progressive social change. But when even the smallest of change takes this much effort and leaves people frustrated and alienated, we should not be focusing this much effort on insignificant changes. It's like trickle down economics - hundreds of minor changes like this will not trickle down into large changes. Most likely the opposite - they'll alienate and infuriate enough people over time to cause a societal swing in the other direction.

If we're gonna put effort like this into bringing about change, let's make it meaningful, something that effects our daily lives now.

That is, in fact, a reason to ignore them. Even if you agree it's a problem (I don't), triage is important. Use your social capital on solving problems of importance, not on annoying people with solutions to minor problems.

[Citation needed], as they'd say on Wikipedia.

I don't think that's the origin at all. Why do you?

Some decent examples here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26504086

Googling "Master Slave audio manual" has a bunch of examples. E.g. this manual from 1959 - https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Catalogs/Ampex/Amp...

Though that Ampex manual isn't all that convincing in this context, IMO. It's about the hardware level, all capacitors and oscillators and stuff, in "master" and "slave" amplifying circuits. That has pretty much nothing at all to do with "master tape" per se; it's more like "master" and "slave" hydraulic cylinders in the clutch or brake system of your car.

Your HN link feels like a much better argument here. (Though I admit I haven't followed any of the links in it yet; going just by the quoted bits in the comment.)

- Someone who has mastered some art;

- A teacher;

- The lead artisan in a team, the one who has mastered the art, teaches and leads.

The slave master is a very narrow interpretation on these meanings, and the woke push against the word is myopic. The word has a long history, none of it connected to slavery.

As for American English, wake me up when they rename Master's degree.

I don't think this concept is unique to Portuguese. Whenever anyone talks about, say, the dutch masters, they are not talking about slavery.

And yet, weirdly to me, there's a lot of people acting like it costs them personally to switch words.

I never gave this topic much thought when it first came up, because it never mattered to me in the fist place if the default branch was called "master" or "A1" or "πρώτα".

Someone wants it called different because of aesthetics? Sure, have fun with the new name! It's no more significant to me than "jif" (the cleaning fluid) being renamed "cif", or Marathon, Snickers.

Of course, if anyone were to have suggested to me that the name alone would be enough to solve racism forever, I might have pointed that the Berlin Wall's official name translated as "anti-fascist protection barrier", as an example of the way people use words to divert from a complete lack of real action or worse to act in direct opposition to the normal meaning of the words.

FWIW some of us in the USA will also continue using the original words as they were intended rather than injecting social issues into language and trying to control people with compelled speech. I for one put all the words back when people swap them out by using FoxReplace for Firefox, Word Replacer II for Chrome and nobody even notices unless I happen to quote them. The people trying to control language are quite selective. For example they have chosen not to tamper with "Masters Degree" but they will change master everywhere else.

This is the silliest, pettiest, snowflakiest thing I've seen in a while.

"Words can't hurt you" say people who are so upset that languages change through various means (yes even intentional! Ask the French) that they go out of their way to edit other people's content to say what they would rather it say.

It's really funny to decry 1984 Ingsoc as you actively rewrite your individual view of reality to conform to your sensibilities, as if that isn't exactly the same ideology.

Partially agreed. I am silly and petty in response to other people trying to force BDSM on me. They try to force everyone into Domination, Submission and Humiliation so I neuter their pseudo mind-rape and teach others how to do the same.

As someone who has recently been converting our branches to use main everywhere because they were previously a horrid mix, I don't care what American politics thinks is linguistically problematic today. In other dialects where the word master is more common, it's not a problem any more than the word "owner" is a problem. I feel roughly the same way about changing master to main as my Guatemalan friend feels about the word "Latinx": I don't want someone making $350k in San Francisco telling me how problematic it is to speak my own language.

Take "owner". What’s a product owner in a SCRUM terminology? Is that the person that when leaving the company will keep full exclusive (or even communal) rights on the product? Or is that just corporate novlang to put motivation/pressure on the "wage slave" (to honor/take/loan/steal vocabulary from an other extremity of social perspective)?

I would guess that 90% of phrases and proverbs used in any language fall into that category.

For example:

Offer wage negotiation coaching to the bottom x% of earners in any given position in the company (or just straight up give raises to them unprompted). Such initiatives will by definition disproportionately help disproportionately disadvantaged demographics without codifying systemic racism/sexism/etc. The reason corporations don't do things like this is because they are interested in scoring brownie points without undermining the status quo class related power structures.

Similarly when providing scholarships, don't limit them to certain ethnicities. Doing so tends to mostly favor the members of the given ethnic group who are already well off. Instead make the scholarship inversely proportional to household income and select applicants randomly weighted by 1/income without regard to skin color.

Build community centers and libraries in poor communities regardless of who lives there. Give money to the ACLU and other organizations that help victims of abuse rather than tweeting a rainbow flag in June while simultaneously organizing an industry event in Saudi Arabia.

> Offer wage negotiation coaching to the bottom x% of earners in any given position in the company (or just straight up give raises to them unprompted)

1. What positions rate this treatment?

2. when do you stop doing this?

And above all, without incurring any actual monetary costs. (Unprompted raises??? Muahahahahaa!)

for example: you should learn that main and master mean absolutely nothing to 95% of the people of the World. In my language "master" translates to maestro, which predates US slavery and symbolizes something completely positive: a master of some - usually artistically relevant - craft with followers that branched from the original (like the master branch in git). they are just labels to us,, if you are offended by that, there are a lot of other ways to cope than attack people who don't care about them and rightfully so.

Even in English, the term "master" branch has nothing to do with slavery. It originates from a master audio recording, usually just referred to as a master, from which other recordings are made.

Late Old English mægester "a man having control or authority over a place; a teacher or tutor of children," from Latin magister (n.) "chief, head, director, teacher" (source of Old French maistre, French maître, Spanish and Italian maestro, Portuguese mestre, Dutch meester, German Meister), contrastive adjective ("he who is greater") from magis (adv.) "more," from PIE mag-yos-, comparative of root meg- "great." The form was influenced in Middle English by Old French cognate maistre.

Source: https://www.etymonline.com/word/master

Exactly. Which is also (what at least I think) where "master copy", which has been claimed to be the origin of git's "master branch" comes from. Whether via the music industry's "master tape" as claimed elsewhere in this discussion, or more directly from the "master's manuscript" all the other monks duplicated in a mediaeval monastery's scriptorium, who knows... But zero to do with slavery, AFAICS.

This is not to say it’s fine to make ad hominem attacks to anyone on its vocabulary. But telling people they should silently accept to use words rooted in a notion of social dominance, doesn’t seem any better. There is a difference on pointing every occurrence of social practices that favor the spread of a domination system, and blaming personally the people who instantiate these practices.

The paradox I've observed people disagreeing with is you either believe in words having magic powers that, such that even if no one knew these connotations they would still have them, or you believe in keeping old connotations alive precisely so you can tell people to stop using them because of the old connotations.

Unilaterally telling others what words they must use is a domination mechanism, whoever engage in such a practice, don’t we agree?

If we don’t listen to what our words inspire to others, how can we know if it matches our intended meaning? If we don’t continuously hone our habits, including our language habits but definitely not only that, how can we progress as human individuals, collectives and societies?

>believe in words having magic powers that, such that even if no one knew these connotations they would still have them

The trick is simple to explain, isn’t it? We can perfectly be healthy carrier, and yet people will die from this virus we contributed to spread.

Just because something is untroublesome in our own specific case doesn’t mean it won’t contribute in the diffusion of something awful at societal level. That is, the only scale level at which we can measure how much benign or hurtful this thing is for humanity.

Except words aren't pathogens. They aren't complex molecular nanomachines that actively avoid our bodies' defenses while incidentally doing damage to it. The only effect they have is in what connotations they trigger in people. In this case, even if the word has troublesome origin, if approximately no one knows about it, then the person bringing up that connotation is the pathogen causing harm to people by convincing them to get worked up over a word, where they wouldn't before.

We can’t know what words will actually have on people until we release them. But we know that words we use can make a significant and measurable difference:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-minute-therapist...

https://brm.institute/neuroscience-behind-words/

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...

>if approximately no one knows about it

How close to "approximately no one knows about" are we in an antonym association like master/slave?

>the person bringing up that connotation is the pathogen

Well, that is what we can call focusing on the person rather than the social mechanism at stake, isn’t it? Kind of an equivalent to the mechanism through which we produce reactions like "look this bird of ill omen that pretends that there is an invisible entity passing from one person to an other but whose malign effect only reveal randomly, clearly this person is the actual cause of the issue".

For some in the US and those adopting this particular aspect of its culture. For everyone else... well, there's some hundred other antonyms that come to mind before:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/master

Apprentice, amateur, loser, subordinate, subject, secondary, incompetent, inexperienced, junior - to list just a few. The only form of "master / slave" association people have - except for in the USA - is with the nomenclature used for IDE/SATA drive configuration in BIOS.

And that's in English alone. Other languages generally have their "master" equivalent disjoint from slavery or adjacent topics.

>Telling to others which word they might consider

Instead the pattern seems to be a group of people on Twitter/Mastadon/social media de jur all taking a quote and sharing talking about how awful it is that someone use the word "blah" in this day and age and how they are a horrible person and we should call up their work and get them fired...

Sometimes even completely misunderstanding what the person is talking about; as one of the first examples of this rousing to cancel people was a guy telling his friend that he would fork that code and someone misunderstood it to be sexual....followed by much ado about dongles.

could be, but...

most words are rooted in a notion of social dominance and only carry a a notion of social dominance when used in the context of expressing social dominance (to oppress or abuse of other people).

words like reign or empire or dictator are absolutely rooted in a notion of social dominance, but we accept that it's completely fine if we use them as a metaphor or as an hyperbole. If someone gets offended, it's their fault.

Some example:

- 2013 was the year in which the reign of Federer at the top of the men's game had supposedly come to an end

- Amazon empire: the rise and reign of Jeff Bezos

- Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, has been called a benevolent dictator for life

Most, I don’t know really, that would need a lot of statistics, but we can certainly agree that a significant portion of the vocabulary pertaining to social matter do.

>words like reign or empire or dictator are absolutely rooted in a notion of social dominance, but we accept that it's completely fine if we use them as a metaphor or as an hyperbole.

Yes, sure, when the context is appropriate, we totally agree. We might lake enough proper bandwidth with flat text alone to discuss that properly though. :D I’m confident it would be far easier to have a conversation on that topic topic around some drinks and laughs for example.

That said, in all example given here, the connection to the toxic social attitudes are obvious.

Every competition-focused sport is rooted in the parable of imposing one dominance on an other, carrying a supremacist perspective with it. That’s why for example yoga competitions will be controversial, while it tennis is not.

As for the two latter celebrities, they don’t really have a reputation of being paragons of empathy that we can point to and say "if everyone would act like this in its interpersonal relationships, humanity would live in gentle bliss and harmony." To be more precise, I don’t know them personally, this remark is really not about these individuals, but more on pointing that in these specific cases, the matching reputation doesn’t serve well the point of uses in metaphoric or hyperbolic ways.

Believe me.

You wanna know something funny?

The word used in Latin for betrayal (tradunt from which derives tradimento in Italian) at its origins meant "to give, transfer, deliver"

When the Christians came to be, they changed its meaning to something bad because Judas "gave Jesus away".

A simple innocent word has become the quintessence of being an awful person because of a stupid religious myth that also started one of the many persecutions of the Jews.

So beware of changing the meaning of words or advocating for their removal from the public discourse, you'll never know who's gonna be hurt by it.

> the connection to the toxic social attitudes are obvious

the only thing that is obvious is that they are only hyperboles, Amazon is not an Empire, Linus Torvalds is not a dictator and Federer did not actually reign over anything.

I would also argue that Linus has been seen as "benevolent" and I really wanna know from you where the connection to the toxic social attitudes lies when we talk about Federer's reign.

It's obvious to me that the sentence was referring to "the king of mens' tennis" (as a metaphor, do you know what they are?) to celebrate him and not to some literal evil ruler who should be dethroned, with the use of the force if necessary.

It’s not like it’s a call to act in any extreme way. Actually, the comment doesn’t even mention anything that one should do.

We can listen to other feelings and interpretations of our words even with zero etymological consideration at stake. But if we try to deny their feeling that some word is derogative and back our perspective on lexical neutrality, maybe we might double check we are not missing some well documented semantics of the word and its history.

That said, given the number of downvotes, it looks like I miss some contextual clues about what it might make it feels as some call to extremist POV.

As I understood from the article, "cargo cults" exactly as in the widely-used metaphor did exist; it's just that they were a small minority of what anthropologists call "cargo cults".

So it seems to me it's you who are being not only spiteful and petty but above all, just plain wrong.

It's the word equivalent of numerology

I won't say that. As much as I frown upon the holier-than-thou attitude plaguing talks on social justice topics, the words we use do have influence on how we think and act.

I didn't remember reading that in the article. Just as a second-check, I've re-read and none of what you say appears in the text. You're building a strawman.

> you're not allowed to

Specifically about this part, we're talking about someone writing on his blog about something he took the time to dig into and sharing his opinion. There isn't much the author can do to be less prescriptive, besides shutting up.

This trope of interpreting every counter-cultural opinion, in every form, as "the powers that be want to gag us" is a way of saying that you won't hear even the smallest dissent.

"The pop-culture cargo cult erases the decades of colonial oppression, along with the cultural upheaval and deaths from World War II. Melanesians deserve to be more than the punch line in a cargo cult story. Thus, it's time to move beyond the cargo cult metaphor."

for which the OPs summary is an acceptable paraphrase.

So someone writing their opinion on their personal blog is equivalent to some authority making a ruling about what you're allowed to?

Freedom of speech has always come with other people being free to tell you that you're wrong and should stop. There is nothing wrong in it, and no freedom of speech is harmed as long as the person stating their position is not in a position to enforce some form of authority.

People may not like what they hear, but feeling oppressed because someone wrote their disagreement on a personal blog is a pathological form of this free-speech rethoric.

You started dishonestly (accusing someone of distorting the article when they were just disagreeing with it), why would anyone now want to have a completely different conversation with you about "free speech"? Do you assume that everyone should want to censor everything that they disagree with?

> People may not like what they hear, but feeling oppressed because someone wrote their disagreement on a personal blog

Now people aren't allowed to feel? Why?

> is a pathological form of this free-speech rethoric.

Are you a doctor or something? Do doctors diagnose rhetoric? Is it "rhetoric" to say how something makes you feel? Why are you telling people how to feel, or giving lectures about free speech?

This one time I got a 'concerned' mail from a dude, remarking that he didn't like some of my public comments. It was longwinded, verbose and Very Serious. He tried to empathize with me by imagining what my politics might be, how I might feel about some of his remarks, etc.

The thing was:

- he got my politics completely wrong

- at no point did he actually cite a single concrete example

- he never actually asked any questions or clarifications

The entire thing was a one-sided lecture he was delivering to an image of me he had created in his head. Once you understand this, you understand woke and why so many people find it so unbearable.

Edit: “delivering to an image of me he had created in his head” - the author doesn’t know you, afaik. He probably didn’t send you this link personally after writing it. You yourself have decided that the article is targeted at you and that it is intended to be negative.

I’ve used the term cargo cult a hundred times. I generally think it’s a useful metaphor. I do not feel offended in any way by this article.

> You're building a strawman.

Given the large number of people in this thread who got the same impression from the article as me, I don't think so. I think this is the actual subtext of the article, stated simply.

> There isn't much the author can do to be less prescriptive, besides shutting up.

Actually there's a huge amount they could do to be less prescriptive, such as using phrases like here's what I'm gonna do but you can make up your own mind.

People count doesn't make sound logic. You will find large numbers of people believing the weirdest things, if you're so inclined.

> I think this is the actual subtext of the article, stated simply.

You used the sentence "you are not allowed". How do you think the blog owner will coerce you if you do not comply with his order ?

> Actually there's a huge amount they could do to be less prescriptive, such as using phrases like here's what I'm gonna do but you can make up your own mind.

Would you describe your own reply on HN as telling people what they're allowed to do or not to do?

Hey, at least it's two letters -- 33% -- shorter.

But for new projects it really doesn't bother me that the default nowadays is "main" in stead of "master", was all I meant.

This stuff isn’t harmless either. It helps push people toward the far right by making them sound reasonable.

The kind interpretation of that video is that "there are always subgroups" but it really felt to me as if they were all lumped in the same bucket of "Indian" by the video producer which seems to me to be rather problematic itself.

But these trainings divide people up into groups—just along arbitrary lines. All of them put white people over here and “people of color” over there. But I suspect the second strongest affinity for most “people of color”—after their own group—is white people. Because that’s who people interact with the most often outside their own group.

The culture I’m most familiar with, after Bangladeshi culture, is southern British American culture, because those are the people I grew up around. If you subdivide people into any groups more granular than “American”—which I don’t think you should do—you can’t put me over there with the Taiwanese and Latinos as “people of color.” I don’t know anything about those people and have no greater affinity for them than I do for any random American.

My sister in law is Taiwanese, and all her friends are Chinese or Taiwanese. And they seem like lovely people, but I’m more out of place in that setting than I am in a room full of white people in Georgia.

I'm not sure it's fair to criticize the trainings; part of the reason for the training is to limit the employer's liability, and there's a huge variation in the liability of "being an asshole" depending on how -- and to whom -- the mistreatment is directed, so the training is going to invariably reflect that legal landscape.

Note that both of your examples given fall under the protected class of race/color. You still might have a more sympathetic judge and/or jury for one example or the other, so it might be relevant in practice, even if it is irrelevant by the letter of the law.

"white people" isn't real. That's why there is a concept of "passing", and why the KKK in my state marched against other white people. All these groupings are arbitrary on their face.

>But these trainings divide people up into groups—just along arbitrary lines.

How do you suggest material about how dividing people up based on the farce of "race" should be made? It needs to have some "in group" vs "out group" to demonstrate how that dynamic works. Are they supposed to use real and explicit life examples? Should every person joining your org be made to watch a training video where a white manager calls a black employee the N word?

Do you not understand the concept of film and acting and theatre? That you often demonstrate matters through allegory or metaphor?

Or do you also complain that Dr Seuss tried to educate children about racism with the "star bellied sneets" because it's just an arbitrary division?

You complain that "they were all wrapped up into the Indian category", but guess what, that's the same story for Italian Americans and the Irish and at one time that nobody seems to remember, the Catholics. "White" is also a horseshit made up group. There is as much diversity in India as there is in America.

Like I just don't get it. What would you rather have to help train adults about racism and how not to be racist?

My daughter has four “affinity groups” at her school. “Black girl magic,” “young black men,” “BIPOC,” and “LGBT alliance.” A teacher recruited her and some Turkish kid into “BIPOC” because they have no other non-black non-white kids.

It’s not just a demonstrative analogy. The people running these diversity programs think theses groups are real.

My suggestion that, since I am a rich white person, maybe I should start using it was met with an emphatic "no."

Also, “main” is far better name than “master” for the primary branch of a git repo for lots of reasons. Did it hurt anything to change the default? Why are you so attached to the old name? If anything it made our automation code better to stop having hard-coded assumptions of what the main branch was called.

Yes. Change always has a cost associated with it. In some cases, that cost is repaid with benefits. In this case, it hasn't and will never pay benefits.

> Why are you so attached to the old name?

Because I refuse to comply with self righteous busybodies who think it's their job to ensure that everyone is acting right. It was obnoxious when those busybodies were railing against comic books/rock music/rap/movies/video games, and it's just as obnoxious when they rail against "master" as a technical term.

If you have some terminology you don't like, provide an alternative.

Main is fine.

But like what is the alternative to cargo cult provided here? It's a very concise representation of a pretty complex idea.

"You are valuing the ritual associated with an outcome instead of the outcome."

Is that my alternative?

Main is more concise than master. But how do I boil that down without saying "cargo cult"?

If someone is unfamiliar with the common English term or is understands it is "by habit" but isn't getting the implicit comparison with a practice following an understanding of the underlying process it, like the image of "cargo cult" referenced in the metaphor, may need expanded a bit on first encounter, but it is both more concise, and uses direct denotation rather than metaphor.

[0] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6828/was-the-ex...

Second, you’re impairing your own ability to communicate with doers because most smart people know what the term “cargo cult” means from Feynman.

https://scroll.in/article/1023979/from-outsiders-to-termites...

Unsure which group you’re in after making this generalization

Apparently, Fundamental of Data Engineering book does refer to cargo-cult metaphor inside its content [1].

[1] Fundamentals of Data Engineering:

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/fundamentals-of-data/97...

But if I'm pulling out the 'cargo cult' metaphor, it's because I'm about to criticise someone for unquestioningly repeating things they've seen elsewhere, without understanding the details.

So if I repeat some nonsense urban legend as fact, in order to criticise them for taking nonsense urban legends as fact - that's going to make me look kinda dumb. Even if it is an urban legend I heard from a nobel prize winner - I can't criticise the mote in my brother's eye until I've removed the beam in my own eye.

(Now I wonder whether Tamarian language is really referencing stories, or referencing the popular understanding of those stories. Sokath, his eyes closed.)

The point is that the metaphor is not just oversimplified and misinformed, but means conflicting things and is overused to the point that is meaningless.

engineer: interesting. what problems has it helped you solve

social engineer:

Cargo cults exist(ed), and like most religious systems throughout history they hinged on a belief that performing certain rituals would have effects on the real world. Some of them did, in fact, see the trappings of the European colonizers as a form of ritual and attempt to recreate the techno-rituals by creating effigies of the European technology.

Nothing in that story is fundamentally disagreed with in TFA. So while it's really helpful to be able to give more life to a previously glib anecdote, the metaphor is still very apt.

The main takeaway for me is that cargo cults were really not any different than most polytheistic religions (and therefore most religions) throughout history in viewing ritual as essentially a technology through which to access good things [0]. But I'm afraid that any new term derived from that insight would be even more problematic for trying to distill an even larger swath of human experience into a single phrase.

[0] See Bret Devereaux's Practical Polytheism series: https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polythei...

> In one unusual case, the islanders built an airstrip and airplanes did come. Specifically, the Miyanmin people of New Guinea hacked an airstrip out of the forest in 1966 using hand tools. The airstrip was discovered by a patrol and turned out to be usable, so Baptist missionaries made monthly landings, bringing medicine and goods for a store. It is pointed out that the only thing preventing this activity from being considered a cargo cult is that in this case, it was effective. See A Small Footnote to the 'Big Walk', p. 59.

Makes you wonder if one could land a job with a firm handshake.

"Grandfathered in" comes from the "grandfather clauses" in post-Reconstruction U.S. laws that allowed white people to bypass literacy tests and poll taxes for voting if their grandfathers had the right to vote. This excluded many Black Americans whose grandfathers had been enslaved and could not vote. This seems like a way more problematic term to use especially when you use it in public facing policies (such as keeping old pricing levels) that apply to your potentially black customers. That could actually be offensive. But it's not because that isn't how normal communication works. People don't go looking to take offense, they take offense when offense is given. Though I would happily expend the brainpower to replace this one.

"Rule of thumb" claimed to come from an old law allowing a man to beat his wife with a stick no wider than his thumb. This saying comes from normalized misogynist physical abuse in our society. Again, this one should go way before cargo cult.

"Cakewalk" originates from the 19th-century practice of enslaved Black people performing exaggerated dances that mimicked European ballroom styles, often judged by plantation owners. Winners were sometimes awarded a cake. This one is just straight up racist and should go way before cargo cult. Especially to represent something being 'easy'. I can't imagine it feels 'easy' to dance funny to entertain your violent owner. The only 'easy' thing was that is was a brake from the slave driver out in the field. You know what, f' using that term (damn I just reversed the point I was making on myself on this one but f' this term).

Heck English itself is problematic/racist at it's roots with it's tendency of saying the french sourced word is proper, and the non-french version is low class. When are we going to take back English from the imposed by violence for French conquerors French influences?

The world is already exhausting. Adding in this level of constantly self policing our thoughts/communication that, in the end, leaves us poorer with less tools for communicating concepts is lose/lose. If something makes people feel bad, yes we should change it. But going looking for reasons to be upset about things and reducing our vocabulary/communal communication over 'researched' outrage is a net negative and seems an Orwellian dumbing down.

I'm sure there are 1000000 other things you could devote your time to than policing someone's blog-post language on HN.

Where, where?

"Hear, hear!" HTH.

It's correct to be anti-racist / anti-sexist / etc. but that doesn't come from just changing your language while still operating the same as before. It reminds me of the whole fuss over using "homeless" vs "unhoused" - while actual policies to help homeless people get ignored or defunded.

Consider how factory, mill, works and plant are all usable to refer to a place where some human endeavor is conducted. The term plant has several etymological hypothesis, including one linking it to slavery and colonization through plantations.[1]

https://shuncy.com/article/why-are-factories-called-plants-c...

I’m not a English native and I’m unaware of the "homeless" vs "unhoused" tensions. But to my mind they still seems same-minded compared to "indigent", "pauper", "sedentarized", "nomad" or "settler".

Like the difference between couchsurfing in a friend's house (homeless but not unhoused) and sleeping in a car or on the street (both homeless and unhoused).

More than one thing happens at a time. I'm fairly certain the people urging us to change our metaphors are also the ones pushing for more substantive change.

I am ambivalent about these language change campaigns myself. On the one hand, you're asking for almost nothing of people other than the agree that they agree something is wrong. On the other, inevitably it results in an ugly, violent backlash which reveals that that which you thought was beyond the pale isn't. Everyone rushes to die on the hill you pointed out.

I have a similar feeling about people insisting that starfish and jellyfish be called sea stars and jellies, but here I think the moral argument lies entirely with the resisters. No one is confused that these radially symmetric things are fish. What, are we going to call cardinals redbirds now because they aren't actually clergymen?

But in the case of metaphors that belittle or bother someone, why not just change? It demands nothing of you but courtesy.

It really doesn't. The human brain is very adept at accepting renames for concepts and we are so accustomed to alternative references to the same thing that we take physical pleasure from wordplay and give nicknames to our favorite things.

It takes only a few tries to start learning a new name or reference to something for normal people.

Hell, give it a try! Take a completely meaningless or harmless term in your life and attempt to use a different word for it. Hell, there is a wonderful children's book about doing this called "Frindle".

I would go so far as to argue being able to liberally and arbitrarily adjust how we reference things is one of the key powers that makes language work, and one of the main ways it enhances our ability to work with concepts and logical systems. Language DOES affect the way we think.

If using a different word for something really does cause you significant cognitive load, consider seeing a psychologist because there might be something "abnormal" about your brain.

> goes on to describe significant cognitive load

You know, it’s fine as well, when there’s a point to it. In this case we have a fairly well written article giving some interesting context around cargo cults, but certainly nothing that contradicts the central idea around the metaphor, and no injured parties AFAICT. So that’s a no.

I think the biggest problem comes when this type of language policing is the primary way of changing behaviors. Lack of adequate conflict resolution leads to dysfunction.

All the responses pushing back against this idiocy in this thread give me hope for the future, that we're regaining our collective sanity.

Clarified at the end of the post, i think a valid complaint is that the fictitious pop culture version (from which the technical use was derived) has unfortunately obscured the anthropologically correct version which is far darker and important.

> Finally, the cargo cult metaphor turns decades of harmful colonialism into a humorous anecdote. Feynman's description of cargo cults strips out the moral complexity: US soldiers show up with their cargo and planes, the indigenous residents amusingly misunderstand the situation, and everyone carries on. However, cargo cults really were a response to decades of colonial mistreatment, exploitation, and cultural destruction. Moreover, cargo cults were often harmful: expecting a bounty of cargo, villagers would throw away their money, kill their pigs, and stop tending their crops, resulting in famine. The pop-culture cargo cult erases the decades of colonial oppression, along with the cultural upheaval and deaths from World War II. Melanesians deserve to be more than the punch line in a cargo cult story.

I don't think it's possible to override the pop culture version, language does its own thing, but the author at least managed to inject a bit of important history back into it for many of us here, and that will probably make an interesting talking point as we are reminded of it each time we use it technically.

Critizize China, russia or isis and you might end up like those who actually fought in the resistance or some menshiwiki. Not recommended how that ended.

My rule of thumb is that anyone who talks about decolonization is a grifter. The specific harms of colonialism are real; decolonial thinking is for those without anything worthwhile to say.

Intent doesn't really matter here; it's just poor communication if you are aware of where the term comes from. Why not just use "dogmatic" or something?

Even "magical thinking" doesn't capture all that nuance.

I don't really see why this distinction is worth preserving. Dogma (i.e. arbitrary and not-rationally-based belief) seems to be the objectionable part here. Where the dogma originates seems less important.

"We should avoid criticizing people's speech."

Note that both of these statements are criticisms of people's speech.

It’s ironic that the author themselves is cargo culting taking back language as an apologetic virtue signal.

“Don't you see that the whole aim of cancel culture is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it”