It seems to me that at least a portion of the recent thread on 'Cargo Cults' dealt with the behavior as a learning pattern. Thinking that in turn reminded me of three other such 'patterns', all tested and found useful over time. I'm sure there are more, these are just the ones that occurred to me first.

• Folk Process
The first deals with the way songs are passed from one singer to another. Despite the current signal to noise ratio over intellectual property, songs would neither survive nor improve if not for the way they migrate from one performer to another, from one region to another.
• Paint by Numbers
The second hasn't got a name that I'm aware of but I suppose that you could call it 'Paint by Numbers' since it is a common way to learn to paint (there are variations in all of the arts, painting is just the first one that came to mind. Here the process is simple, find a painting you like and copy it. Eyeball the difference between the two, repeat until the delta approaches zero.
• Kata
The third comes from the martial arts, for example the 26 teaching forms of Shotokan karate. Another meaning comes from the literal translation of the characters in the word, i.e. the shape that cuts the ground.

Come to think of it, they are all pretty much the same thing. The basic idea is that you copy something good until you make it your own. The 'make it your own' part even includes the notion of transcription errors as a possibly good thing! If you check out http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Folk+Process%22 you will see that mistakes are a great source of both improvement and comedy! (Hmmm? process + mutation = evolution??) Repetition followed by mastery. And one of the reasons that these are effective beginner patterns is that blind faith works just fine. Or no faith at all or even complete theoretical knowledge, the only important part is repetition (well with an admitted sub-text of learning). Further these are things that can be done even without the help of a teacher. Granted all other things being equal having someone else monitor the process is better than not, but the history of endeavor shows that the process still works in isolation.

–hsm

"Never try to teach a pig to sing…it wastes your time and it annoys the pig."

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