Comment by godelski

  >> Just because your wooden plane glides doesn't mean it's AC an actual plane

  > But if your wooden plane can somehow make it to Europe, collect cargo, and bring it back to your island

Sure, but these are categorically different and not related to my point.

  > That's why copypasta doesn't count as cargo culting.

Let me quote wiki[0]

  The term cargo cult programmer may apply when anyone inexperienced with the problem at hand copies some program code from one place to another with little understanding of how it works or whether it is required.

  Cargo cult programming can also refer to the practice of applying a design pattern or coding style blindly without understanding the reasons behind that design principle. Some examples are adding unnecessary comments to self-explanatory code, overzealous adherence to the conventions of a programming paradigm, or adding deletion code for objects that garbage collection automatically collects. 

Even in the example it gives the code will "work." You can collect garbage when the language already does that, you'll get performance hits, but your code won't break.

It "it doesn't _work_" disqualifies something from not being cargo cult programming, then there would be no cargo cult programming. Who is shipping code that doesn't compile or hits runtime errors with any form of execution? You couldn't do that for very long.

Let's take an airplane example. Say you want to copy Boeing[1]. You notice that every 747 has a coffee maker on it. So you also make a coffee maker. After all, it is connected to the electrical system and the engines. Every time you take out the coffee maker the airplane fails. So you just put in a coffee maker.

A cargo cult exists BECAUSE _something_ is "working". BECAUSE they have evidence. But it is about misunderstanding the causality. See also Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science"[2]. As dumb as people are, there's always a reason people do things. It is usually not a good reason and it is often a bad reason, but there is a reason. Even people will explain you "causal" explanations for things like astrology.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_programming

[1] Well in the past you might have wanted to lol

[2] https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.pdf

  > not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results

His explanation explicitly acknowledges the experiment works. In fact, even the math to explain the experiment "works". But it is wrong. Related is Von Neuman's Elephant. Where Freeman Dyson had evidence that a theory explained an experiment, yet it was in fact wrong. Evidence isn't sufficient to determine causality.