[johnohara]

Not sure "Cargo Cult" is an apt description. Feynman's description of Cargo Cult Science was predicated on the behavior of islanders building structures in expectation it would summon the planes, cargo, personnel, etc. that used the island during WWII.

Without a previous experience they would not have built anything.

There is no previous AI experience behind today's pursuit of the AI grail. In other words, no planes with cargo driving an expectation of success. Instead, the AI pursuit is based upon the probability of success, which is aptly defined as risk.

A correct analog would be the islanders building a boat and taking the risk of sailing off to far away shores in an attempt to procure the cargo they need.

[wmf]

Arguably AI is already "successful" in terms of funding and press coverage and that's what many people are chasing.

[blamestross]

Yeah, "cargo cult" is abused as a term. Those islanders were smarter than what is happening here.

We use it dismissively but "cargo cult" behaviour is entirely reasonable. You know an effect is possible, and you observe novel things corellating with it. You try them to test the causality. It looks silly when you know the lesson already, but it was intelligent and reasonable behaviour the entire way.

The current situation is bubble denial, not cargo culting. Blaming cargo culting is a mechanism of bubble denial here.

[o11c]

It's called "science experiments", except when it produces the null result.

[smogcutter]

This is a good point as a tangent. “Cargo Cult” is a meaningful phrase for ritualizing a process without understanding it.

Debasing the phrase makes it less useful and informative.

It’s a cargo cult usage of “cargo cult”!

[tremon]

Isn't the entire point of an LLM to "ritualize" language without understanding a word of it?

[sails]

I’m amazed they published it with such a poorly applied analogy.