Chaos Magnet

Cargo cult engineering

Ned Batchelder points out an article on cargo cult engineering. As Richard Feynman described them cargo cults are "a cargo cult of people [in the South Seas]. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head for headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he's the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land."

Feynman talks about how this relates to scientific research, in which researchers fail to understand the causes of their results, but in the case of cargo cult engineering, companies mistake a symptom of successful projects (long hours) with the cause (personal commitment of the engineers). Interesting reading.

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