I found your history very interesting (I was familiar with much of it but I don't think I've seen so much collected in one place) but I had some issues with your conclusion, mostly because I don't really see the phrase "cargo cult" or the verbed form "cargo culting" to be inherently pejorative. I think the concept of someone going through the motions without a necessary understanding of their purpose to achieve the desired effects is very useful one, especially given the ever increasing layers of abstraction that exist in our society.
Have you thought about an alternative concept or word that describes this phenomenon that could be used instead?
I read the whole history and it only affirms my belief that the phrase is spot on. I'm not concerned of its pop culture origin, etc.
Look, these people were seriously believing some ridiculous junk. Most Europeans once believed some ridiculous junk. There's millennia old ridiculous junk still being believed. It's all "cargo cult".
> Have you thought about an alternative concept or word that describes this phenomenon that could be used instead?
I think "magical thinking" would be an appropriate term for what Feynman characterizes.
However, one of the post's important points is that we're not even using Feynman's mischaracterized explanation of cargo cults: it's become a generic negative descriptor for anything the user considers insufficiently justified, even if the underlying rationale is not "magical."
Magical thinking is a bit different than cargo-culting. Magical thinking is the belief that unrelated events are causally connected. For example, "I survived the car crash because I had my lucky charm in my backpack".
Cargo-culting is the belief that specific best practices which are causally connected to an outcome in one context will produce those outcomes in other contexts where the chain of causal reasoning no longer holds. For example, "I survived the car crash because I was wearing a seatbelt. Now I'll install a seatbelt on my bicycle too."
Cargo-culting is an important concept in its own right in the tech industry, because those best practices do get often blindly shared, recommended and even enforced into codes and standards, even when the context that made them a good idea is lost. Without a concept like "cargo-culting" to label the fallacy, it can be hard to argue against that proposal, because the side recommending the change has lots of out-of-context data in their favor. For example, "car-crash survival rates are much higher when drivers are wearing seatbelts. Therefore, we're now requiring bicycles and motorbikes to have seatbelts."
Clearing an airstrip isn't magical thinking though, you'd need to do that for planes to land. It's just not sufficient, because the planes also need to want to land there. I don't think magical thinking covers that same concept.
It appears that there are some people (like you and the post author) that are constantly confronted with someone screaming "cargo cult", which has to be exhausting. But it's absolutely not the world others live in. In my world, it comes up every now and then (I'd guess every 3-4 months), and I've experienced it multiple times that I mention it and the other person hadn't heard it before but absolutely LOVED the term after an explanation because it describes certain behaviors so well.
The magical thinking in the case of the airstrip is the lack of a causative connection: you need to clear the airstrip for the plane to land, but clearing an airstrip does not make a plane land.
Or in other words, magical thinking doesn't imply the lack of a conceptual connection: airstrips and planes landing are definitely conceptually connected. Magical thinking is the drawing of illogical causative connections from conceptual ones.
(I don't run into "cargo cult" that often. But I think TFA is a great writeup of why it's not the best term; as engineers, I think we should aspire to use the best terms available to us.)
Magical thinking explicitly lacks the connection -- that's why it's magical after all. Jupiter and Mars are aligned, therefore I missed my bus, that sort of thing.
That's not what I usually encounter. I see people imitating something they've seen others do (who appear to be successful) without understanding the full concept. Their efforts are in vain because clearing the brush for an airstrip doesn't make the planes land, and neither does one deliver projects more successfully by changing nothing except asking everyone to join a daily meeting each morning.
Have you thought about an alternative concept or word that describes this phenomenon that could be used instead?