Cargo cults are a phenomenon with origins in WWII. During the war, the Japanese and American militaries moved tremendous amounts of supplies around the South Pacific. They set up bases on remote islands, some of whom had never seen foreigners before.
These islanders had a culture of gift-giving. Social status depended on how much you were able to give away. The person who was capable of giving a gift that the recipient couldn’t match got the upper hand.
So the appearance of strangers bearing unimaginable wealth, casually sharing it, and then disappearing at the war’s end was a terrible shock to these communities. Unable to understand descriptions of how the goods were physically produced using industrial methods, the natives decided — using the best logic available to them — that it must involve magic.
The foreigners cleared landing strips, built control towers, and listened to the radio, and then the planes landed with goods. So the natives cleared space out of the jungle, built bamboo towers, wore coconut headphones, hoping the goods would flow.
Arrogance leads some people to feel superior to these natives’ concepts of magic, but that’s a mistake. In their own way, the natives are conducting a form of primitive science. And our advanced science is not as different from magic as we might hope.
As a programmer, I can tell you every bug you have to investigate stems from a discrepancy between how the system actually works, and your mental model of how you _think_ it works. The harder a bug is to understand, the more subtle and deeply embedded your incorrect assumption. One critical element of solving a bug is swallowing your pride and accepting you did not fully understand the system before.
This exposes a fundamental disconnect between the human mind and true reality, which has been known as far back as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. It is not possible to tell the difference between a correct theory, and an incorrect theory which happens to produce the same predictions, until there is some difference between them.
Once, when my kid was little, we got in my old car to go somewhere, and it wouldn’t start. I tried turning it over a couple times, and then just sat there for a minute to think. The kid said, “Maybe it would help if we sang a song!” I didn’t think singing a song would help, but sometimes waiting a minute does. So we sang a song while we waited in case, say, the carburator was flooded.
When we finished the song, it still wouldn’t start. Over time, you can exclude certain possibilities in practice because they never solve the problem. But the fact that waiting sometimes solves the problem can’t be so easily tied to a solution. It could be carburator flooding, but an overheated ignition coil will also work after a waiting period.
In a car engine, if you know what you’re doing, you can get inside the carburator to visually inspect it, or put a multi-meter on the coil to read how many volts it’s producing. There’s no way to “look inside” a computer though. You can set outputs at various places, and verify they have the values you expect, but it is always possible that the output is not coming from where you think it is. This is the essence of how computer malware hides itself — it swaps out the value you think you’re accessing with the one it wants you to see, like Indiana Jones swapping the gold statue with the bag of sand.
Reality is like an operating system. We can experiment to verify certain characteristics of our mental model have the values that we expect. But there’s no way to be sure our mental model is pointing at the right thing.
This explains why no one has a claim to arrogance. No matter how sure you are, there is forever and always a chance that you might be wrong. It’s barely been fifty years since we learned smoking causes cancer, doctors in lab coats made ads extolling the virtues of some brand of cigarettes. Something about our current understanding of the world is undoubtably wrong.
And how awful would that be, if you were unkind to someone and you weren’t even correct. So since there’s always a chance, you can never risk arrogance.
If you’re kinda not sure, be sure to be kind.
We all perform our own cargo cult rituals.
Cargo cults are a phenomenon with origins in WWII. During the war, the Japanese and American militaries moved tremendous amounts of supplies around the South Pacific. They set up bases on remote islands, some of whom had never seen foreigners before.
These islanders had a culture of gift-giving. Social status depended on how much you were able to give away. The person who was capable of giving a gift that the recipient couldn’t match got the upper hand.
So the appearance of strangers bearing unimaginable wealth, casually sharing it, and then disappearing at the war’s end was a terrible shock to these communities. Unable to understand descriptions of how the goods were physically produced using industrial methods, the natives decided — using the best logic available to them — that it must involve magic.
The foreigners cleared landing strips, built control towers, and listened to the radio, and then the planes landed with goods. So the natives cleared space out of the jungle, built bamboo towers, wore coconut headphones, hoping the goods would flow.
Arrogance leads some people to feel superior to these natives’ concepts of magic, but that’s a mistake. In their own way, the natives are conducting a form of primitive science. And our advanced science is not as different from magic as we might hope.
As a programmer, I can tell you every bug you have to investigate stems from a discrepancy between how the system actually works, and your mental model of how you _think_ it works. The harder a bug is to understand, the more subtle and deeply embedded your incorrect assumption. One critical element of solving a bug is swallowing your pride and accepting you did not fully understand the system before.
This exposes a fundamental disconnect between the human mind and true reality, which has been known as far back as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. It is not possible to tell the difference between a correct theory, and an incorrect theory which happens to produce the same predictions, until there is some difference between them.
Once, when my kid was little, we got in my old car to go somewhere, and it wouldn’t start. I tried turning it over a couple times, and then just sat there for a minute to think. The kid said, “Maybe it would help if we sang a song!” I didn’t think singing a song would help, but sometimes waiting a minute does. So we sang a song while we waited in case, say, the carburator was flooded.
When we finished the song, it still wouldn’t start. Over time, you can exclude certain possibilities in practice because they never solve the problem. But the fact that waiting sometimes solves the problem can’t be so easily tied to a solution. It could be carburator flooding, but an overheated ignition coil will also work after a waiting period.
In a car engine, if you know what you’re doing, you can get inside the carburator to visually inspect it, or put a multi-meter on the coil to read how many volts it’s producing. There’s no way to “look inside” a computer though. You can set outputs at various places, and verify they have the values you expect, but it is always possible that the output is not coming from where you think it is. This is the essence of how computer malware hides itself — it swaps out the value you think you’re accessing with the one it wants you to see, like Indiana Jones swapping the gold statue with the bag of sand.
Reality is like an operating system. We can experiment to verify certain characteristics of our mental model have the values that we expect. But there’s no way to be sure our mental model is pointing at the right thing.
This explains why no one has a claim to arrogance. No matter how sure you are, there is forever and always a chance that you might be wrong. It’s barely been fifty years since we learned smoking causes cancer, doctors in lab coats made ads extolling the virtues of some brand of cigarettes. Something about our current understanding of the world is undoubtably wrong.
And how awful would that be, if you were unkind to someone and you weren’t even correct. So since there’s always a chance, you can never risk arrogance.
If you’re kinda not sure, be sure to be kind.
