Cult Classic

Perhaps the brilliant Richard Feynman can shed some light upon the matter.

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make 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 to 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.

I first learned of these original Cargo Cults in the SF novel Dream Park by Niven and Barnes. The greatest time of these tribes' lives was when the white man brought powerful Cargo from faraway lands; by going through the same motions as their visitors, they hope to bring the same result. The Jargon File adds a more modern meaning to the phrase. Essentially, if you're going through a series of motions to intended to achieve some result, without knowing why it's supposed to produce that result, that's cargo cultist thinking.