In The Salmon of Doubt (I think), there's a transcript of a talk that the staunchly atheist Douglas Adams gave, and one of the things he mentions is the concept

In The Salmon of Doubt (I think), there's a transcript of a talk that the staunchly atheist Douglas Adams gave, and one of the things he mentions is the concept of Feng Shui, which he explains as the notion that the contents of your house should be arranged such that a Chinese dragon would be able to walk through it without scraping itself on corners or getting stuck in dead-ends. Clearly, to a rational scientific mind, the idea that your belongings should be organised for the benefit of magic invisible dragons is ridiculous. And yet... there's no doubt that some particular furniture layouts are more convenient or more aesthetically pleasing than others, and without a rigorous, mathematical function for deciding the optimum layout, perhaps the metaphor of a dragon walking around the house is a useful one - that is, it's not true in a scientific sense, but it's a concept that turns a relatively abstract and complicated problem-space into something concrete enough for the human mind to grapple with. I take this notion of "daemons" or "geniuses" to be something similar - it certainly doesn't pass Occam's Razor, but in this case we're not looking to discern Ultimate Truth. We just want to find a way of looking at the world that defuses the complex and oppressively powerful psychological feedback-loops that seem to be associated with creative vocations.