揽瓜阁阅读做题小分队第108天货物崇拜 - ChaseDream

Cargo cults are religious movements that have appeared in tribal societies following interaction with technologically advanced cultures whose representatives have arrived bearing manufactured goods, or "cargo." These cults were known in the late nineteenth century, but arose in earnest in the years following World War II, as members of tribal societies came into contact with radios, televisions, guns, airplanes, and other goods brought to New Guinea and other Micronesian and Melanesian countries as part of the Allied war effort. Members of native societies, having little knowledge of Western manufacturing, found soldiers' explanations of the cargo's provenance unconvincing and drew the conclusion that the "cargo" had come about through spiritual means. Some concluded that the cargo had been created by the deities and ancestors of the native people, and that the foreigners had attracted the cargo to themselves through trickery, or through an error made by the deities and ancestors. Cargo cults arose for the purpose of attracting material wealth back to its "rightful owners" via religious rituals that sought to mimic the actions of the foreigners in order to attract cargo. The most famous of the cargo cults still exists on the island of Tanna in Vanautu, where cult members have constructed elaborate airstrips and control towers intended to attract airplanes, and where an annual celebration features barefoot soldiers in re-created U.S. Army uniforms conducting military exercises. Cult members wearing "headphones" made of wood can be observed speaking into "radios" made of coconuts and straw, mimicking actions observed by Allied troops during the war.

Members of cargo cults commit the fallacy of confusing a necessary condition with a sufficient one. It is true, of course, that an airstrip and a control tower are necessary for executing a safe landing of a military airplane; they are not, of course, sufficient to attract an airplane in the first place. Communicating with a radio tower may bring new supplies; speaking gibberish into a straw replica of a radio, of course, will not bring the desired cargo. Thus, the term "cargo cult" has arisen as an idiom in English to describe those who mimic the superficial appearance of a procedure without understanding the underlying purpose, meaning, or functioning of that procedure.

In the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, physicist Richard Feynman dedicates a chapter to "cargo cult science," the product of researchers who create the appearance of real science— even with the fastidiousness of those who create a full-size Jeep from bamboo and straw— but without an understanding of the underlying workings of real science. Feynman gives the example of experiments involving running rats through a maze. In 1937, a researcher named Young discovered that rats who had run a maze previously were using some hidden cue on subsequent runs that invalidated the results of those trials. Through meticulous experimentation, Young discovered that the rats could use the sounds made by the maze's floorboards to memorize positions within the maze; when the maze was put on a floor of sand, this cue was removed, and future experiments could be conducted untainted by the "floorboard problem." However, Young's research made no impact whatsoever; other scientists— cargo cult scientists— went on running rats through the maze just as they had before, publishing their results and going about the motions of science without, as Feynman argues, actually doing science.