"Cargo-culting" has been redefined and repurposed many, many times for different domains (science, programming, software engineering, etc). It's the closest te

"Cargo-culting" has been redefined and repurposed many, many times for different domains (science, programming, software engineering, etc). It's the closest term I know of to name the process I describe, so that's what I used. As you can see from the post, I'm aware of the semantic and etymological difficulty. If you have a better term you'd like to suggest, I'm all ears; having it won't make the process I describe "more wrong" though. To use your characterization, the database index example is where someone has an expectation that adding indexes are a valid reflexive response to slow querying. Of course the post goes back to navel-gazing in the end. It started out with a tweet, so I'm not sure why you'd expect anything less. In any case, I hope the space in between proves useful or thought-provoking to some.