It's like the story of a young couple cooking their first Christmas ham.

The wife cuts the end off of the ham before putting it in the oven. The husband, unwise in the ways of cooking, asks her why she does this.

"I don't know", says the wife, "I did it because my mom did it."

So they call the mom. It turns out that her mother did it, so she did too.

The three of them call the grandma and ask "Why did you cut the end off of the ham before cooking it?"

The grandma laughs and says "I cut it off because my pan was too small!"

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bombcar 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

It's the corollary to Chesterton's Fence - don't remove it until you know why it's there, but also investigate why it's there.

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chrisweekly 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Haha, cargo cult strikes again!

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01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2 days ago | parent [-]

For today's 10,000: https://www.righto.com/2025/01/its-time-to-abandon-cargo-cul...

> The pop-culture cargo cult description, however, takes features of some cargo cults (the occasional runway) and combines this with movie scenes to yield an inaccurate and fictionalized dscription. It may be hard to believe that the description of cargo cults that you see on the internet is mostly wrong, but in the remainder of this article, I will explain this in detail.

	▲	chrisweekly a day ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks. TIL. FWIW, I meant it strictly in the generic vernacular sense in which I've encountered it: doing something because it has the outward form of something useful or meaningful, without understanding whether or how it works. Given the problematic history you shared, it seems a new term is needed for this... maybe "Chesterson's Folly"? It's related to Chesterson's Fence (the principle that it's unwise to remove a fence if you don't know why it was erected). If you leave in place all "fences" you don't understand, and never take the time to determine their purpose, fences which serve no good purpose will accumulate.