I love the catchy name “pattern botching”. And it seems to describe rather well maybe 50% of all casual interactions. Cargo culting and correspondence bias seem to be examples of this general miscommunication. Also, this writeup seems good enough for Main.
Cargo cult is different—it’s not about (mis)communication at all, but rather about the inability (or unwillingness) to distinguish between outward, surface phenomena on the one hand and internal mechanisms and causal chains on the other.
But yeah, “pattern botching” is an excellent name.
Glad you guys like the name. I spent quite awhile and tried out some other ones before that one stuck.
I think that classical cargo-culting is indeed quite different from pattern-botching, but when you have people who know better doing something cargo-cult-like, then that’s likely an instance of pattern-botching.
when you have people who know better doing something cargo-cult-like
Like Feynman’s description of cargo-cult science? I suspect it’s mostly the result of a particular set of incentives which are structured to reward the cargo-cult visible manifestations and ignore actual work.
Yeah, I was thinking about that. I think lots of people (the students, for example) don’t actually know better. But among those who do, yeah, I would say that the incentives are the cause of the object-level behaviour where they’re not doing real science, and the pattern-botching is the mental process where they don’t notice that they’re not doing real science.
I love the catchy name “pattern botching”. And it seems to describe rather well maybe 50% of all casual interactions. Cargo culting and correspondence bias seem to be examples of this general miscommunication. Also, this writeup seems good enough for Main.
Cargo cult is different—it’s not about (mis)communication at all, but rather about the inability (or unwillingness) to distinguish between outward, surface phenomena on the one hand and internal mechanisms and causal chains on the other.
But yeah, “pattern botching” is an excellent name.
Glad you guys like the name. I spent quite awhile and tried out some other ones before that one stuck.
I think that classical cargo-culting is indeed quite different from pattern-botching, but when you have people who know better doing something cargo-cult-like, then that’s likely an instance of pattern-botching.
Like Feynman’s description of cargo-cult science? I suspect it’s mostly the result of a particular set of incentives which are structured to reward the cargo-cult visible manifestations and ignore actual work.
Yeah, I was thinking about that. I think lots of people (the students, for example) don’t actually know better. But among those who do, yeah, I would say that the incentives are the cause of the object-level behaviour where they’re not doing real science, and the pattern-botching is the mental process where they don’t notice that they’re not doing real science.