Cargo Cults

Melanesia refers to a vast region in the Pacific Ocean, just off the northeast coast of Australia, and just as big as that continent. Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea are here, among two thousand smaller islands that make up the group.

Melanesian people aren’t all one homogeneous group, but they do share a lot of cultural and linguistic similarities due to trade and travel over the previous millennia. Some of our earliest and greatest seafaring ancestors originated from this region, and they had tens of thousands of years to practice.

Even with this connection, though, these islands were remote by any standards, and so these islanders lived in relative isolation from the rest of the world. They developed their own myths and versions of histories, trying to explain the world from their point of view.

Immediately after World War II, powerful change was rocking the world everywhere. Remote Melanesia was no exception to this, and the native inhabitants saw a flood of Western goods of all kinds coming into their islands. All of this cargo included impressive technology like transistor radios and other technical wonders of the day, but it also included much-needed medical supplies and canned food.

Melanesians experienced all of this through the lens of a culture that had not been told what any of this meant. This led to some really interesting results.

The astute observers among them had noticed that the American or British forces would perform a ritual every time goods were brought in. This turned out to be the landing crew waving lights around so the cargo plane could find the runway easily, but to the Melanesians, it seemed like the key to unlocking all of this bounty.

Suddenly, the bounty stopped. The strange metal birds stopped landing, and the people of Melanesia stopped getting all that sweet cargo.

So, they developed their own ritual, centering around makeshift landing strips. They would light up torches to mimic those lights the planes would use to find where to land, and they built tall control towers out of bamboo.

I’m reminded of this terrific quote from Arthur C Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” To the Melanesians, who had no concept of global supply chains or 20th century technology, a metal bird landing on their island with cargo in its belly certainly seemed like magic.

Many of these cults centered around the idea that the cargo from above was meant to reach the Melanesian people, but the Westerners were somehow blocking the flow of goods from the gods, or perhaps from their ancestors. Sometimes they’d speak into coconut halves while wearing makeshift headphones, mimicking air traffic control. Some folks would march in tight military procession.

Anthropologists started calling these groups cargo cults. The name helped to emphasize the central distinction, that these sects wanted manna from the sky to continue, just as they had been receiving it regularly for a few years now. They were all about getting this cargo, and they were cults because they thought the way to get them was via a ritual.

When Richard Feynman heard anthropologists using this terminology, he knew it was the perfect metaphor for pseudoscientists who presented their work as though it were real science. Real science meant testing rigorously and vigorously, trying to disprove it the entire time, and passing every single test with an A+. Cargo cult science meant trying to trick people into thinking you had done all this work.

Here’s Feynman talking about why pseudoscience bothers him so much:

I love the cautionary metaphor of cargo cults. They remind us not to fall into the trap of cherry-picking the data to make sure it matches what you want to see, for you are the easiest person for you to fool. With minimal experience, we vastly overestimate our understanding of the totality of a subject. We’re far too quick to imagine that someone had a particular intention when they did something. Cognitive bias is everywhere.

In summary, we need a reminder like this.