I feel like this is what happens when you want to copy something you don't understand, and thereby only get the trappings of it.
Because it looks like they wanted a "modern" bridge to make them look more advanced and smart, but had no idea how those work. Rather than sticking with what they know, like tree trunks.
In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to 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 like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.
For anyone that sees this, the whole article is an interesting read. This part really stood out to me:
And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down—or hardly going up—in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There’s a witch doctor remedy that doesn’t work. It ought to be looked into: how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress—lots of theory, but no progress—in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.
Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way—or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn’t do “the right thing,” according to the experts.
So we really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science.
Obviously I like this speech since I linked it, but I also can't help but wonder where Feynman would have stood if he were alive 2 years ago. Probably for the best he didn't live that long for us to find out.
Right, that's one of the most extreme versions but you see it everywhere. Most videos of tribal people meeting with whites for the first time you can see this play out in real time, and for years after.
Most of Africa today is built on the idea. Its why there is always just something slightly off about a lot of their "modern" elements.
Read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. It's an extremely easy read. A sampling:
• Feynman gives a commencement speech at a SA university where he tells everyone, students and faculty, they're retarded, except the one guy who turns out to be a German exchange student.
• A PUA acquaintance tells him how to get women. He tries it and it works. Feynman concludes the guy is probably right, but it feels unsporting, so Feynman never tries it again.
• He tries to put forth the 'critical thinking' meme, but most of his math stories are about how memorizing way too much ended up saving the day.
• He was such a good lockbreaker at Los Alamos that engineers would ask him to open file cabinets of people who were away rather than wait for the owners to return. He would have to sit in an empty office for 20 minutes with the door closed doing nothing to make sure he didn't accidentally open the locks too quickly.
A PUA acquaintance tells him how to get women. He tries it and it works. Feynman concludes the guy is probably right, but it feels unsporting, so Feynman never tries it again.
Like pushing deer. It works every time, but doesn't seem fair.
Man, I should reread that book, it was great. There's also a really funny story where he's asked to review some plans for a new facility. He has no idea what he's looking at, so he just randomly points at a spot and asks "Why is this here?". The architects take a look, pause for a while, and go "Oh wow, you're right, that makes no sense! You're a genius, Mr. Feynman!"
Well, now you see how many rituals came about. Something worked before (or seemed to work because of coincidence), but for some reason, it doesn't any more, but that doesn't matter, because the people forgot the real reason behind WHY they were doing that ritual many generations ago, anyway.
The nature of rituals is that they're a way for smart people to encode their wisdom in such a way as to be useful for not smart people. But the problem is that the smart people don't themselves always understand why the ritual works.
Or as a former engineer boss told me many years ago when I was describing some problem I was working on where I didn't understand how the solution worked: "you're an engineer: you don't have to understand how it works as long as it does".
Imagine your tribe lives in a place where your water is seasonally bad.
Once or few times a year a lot of people get sick and start shiting and puking themselves to death. So you bang some drums and waft some smoke over them to drive the bad spirits out.
Maybe half of them have a good enough immune system to weather it, so they recover. And just like the drum banging and smoke cure dysentery/cholera/typhoid, at least some times.
"This design makes no sense, we can't use it!" "But the Americans designed it, so there must be something awesome about it!" "Okay, but we're gonna un-retard it as much as we can." (years and billions of rubles pass) "Wait, it was just a retarded design?"
I feel like this is what happens when you want to copy something you don't understand, and thereby only get the trappings of it.
Because it looks like they wanted a "modern" bridge to make them look more advanced and smart, but had no idea how those work. Rather than sticking with what they know, like tree trunks.
Cargo Cult Science, from 1974:
For anyone that sees this, the whole article is an interesting read. This part really stood out to me:
Obviously I like this speech since I linked it, but I also can't help but wonder where Feynman would have stood if he were alive 2 years ago. Probably for the best he didn't live that long for us to find out.
Given how he handled the Challenger report, I think he would've done us proud.
First paragraph: Arm the people.
Second: Spank the children.
Done.
Right, that's one of the most extreme versions but you see it everywhere. Most videos of tribal people meeting with whites for the first time you can see this play out in real time, and for years after.
Most of Africa today is built on the idea. Its why there is always just something slightly off about a lot of their "modern" elements.
Read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. It's an extremely easy read. A sampling:
• Feynman gives a commencement speech at a SA university where he tells everyone, students and faculty, they're retarded, except the one guy who turns out to be a German exchange student.
• A PUA acquaintance tells him how to get women. He tries it and it works. Feynman concludes the guy is probably right, but it feels unsporting, so Feynman never tries it again.
• He tries to put forth the 'critical thinking' meme, but most of his math stories are about how memorizing way too much ended up saving the day.
• He was such a good lockbreaker at Los Alamos that engineers would ask him to open file cabinets of people who were away rather than wait for the owners to return. He would have to sit in an empty office for 20 minutes with the door closed doing nothing to make sure he didn't accidentally open the locks too quickly.
Like pushing deer. It works every time, but doesn't seem fair.
Man, I should reread that book, it was great. There's also a really funny story where he's asked to review some plans for a new facility. He has no idea what he's looking at, so he just randomly points at a spot and asks "Why is this here?". The architects take a look, pause for a while, and go "Oh wow, you're right, that makes no sense! You're a genius, Mr. Feynman!"
Well, now you see how many rituals came about. Something worked before (or seemed to work because of coincidence), but for some reason, it doesn't any more, but that doesn't matter, because the people forgot the real reason behind WHY they were doing that ritual many generations ago, anyway.
The nature of rituals is that they're a way for smart people to encode their wisdom in such a way as to be useful for not smart people. But the problem is that the smart people don't themselves always understand why the ritual works.
Or as a former engineer boss told me many years ago when I was describing some problem I was working on where I didn't understand how the solution worked: "you're an engineer: you don't have to understand how it works as long as it does".
Holy fuck, that sounds like a really dangerous attitude for engineers.
That just further degraded my trust in .. a lot of things.
Life's a Skinner Box, and we all bob our heads and press button when the lights flicker.
Imagine your tribe lives in a place where your water is seasonally bad.
Once or few times a year a lot of people get sick and start shiting and puking themselves to death. So you bang some drums and waft some smoke over them to drive the bad spirits out.
Maybe half of them have a good enough immune system to weather it, so they recover. And just like the drum banging and smoke cure dysentery/cholera/typhoid, at least some times.
Saw a YouTube video on it a while back. The wooden facsimiles are surprisingly well done.
Ah so the Soviet space program in the 80s.
"This design makes no sense, we can't use it!" "But the Americans designed it, so there must be something awesome about it!" "Okay, but we're gonna un-retard it as much as we can." (years and billions of rubles pass) "Wait, it was just a retarded design?"
sad Buran noises