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>In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he's the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science
Assuming these south seas people have never been in contact with modern civilisation, how are they acting retarded?
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>>7783372
Nobody said they are. To the best of their knowledge these are the actions which are required for an event to happen. Rain dances, hunting rituals, animal sacrifice, all early pseudo-scientific attempts at understanding the world. Even the Mayan calendar is pseudo-scientific. The act of counting days between eclipses, full-moons, etc,while it may allow for prediction of future events, does not get into the process of what causes a full moon or an eclipse. But one can say these are essential steps in the evolution of a culture from the stone age to the industrial age.
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