"You just turned 100 today - what's your secret to a long life?" - No matter what the answer will be, I guarantee you that there are millions of people in the world who do the exact same and still die young. But yeah, of course aunt Margharet only managed to live an entire century because she ate three cans of surströmming every week, no doubt. Genetics, healthcare and lifestyle have nothing to do with it. Nothing at all.

Edit/addendum: Weird specific example

Something similar was also my no.1 pet peeve on reddit whenever people argued about how the Blood Moon works in Breath of the Wild. It's an in-game timer of roughly 3 hours, but the game does not tell you about it, nor does it display the timer, and back when the game code wasn't cracked yet, there were a LOT of outrageously weird theories about how to allegedly make the Blood Moon appear.

So you just "made" a BM happen by running straight into a wall for 3 hours? Yes you got a BM, but not "because" you were running into a wall for 3 hours, but because the effing timer was up. The game does not care for WHAT you do in that time.

So you reloaded and ran into a wall again and the BM happened again? It is STILL not because you ran into a wall - you rewinded the effing timer by reloading a save file from before the event you're trying to trigger, and then the timer was up again. (They never bothered to check whether it would happen if they did not try to trigger it with their chosen tactic)

It is really really hard to try and convince these people that they're wrong, because once they're convinced that a specific action yields a specific result, they WILL keep doing it over and over again until it "works" and then see it as proof. But by the same logic you can also throw tomatoes at a wall until it starts to rain and then claim that the rain happened because you just threw 547 tomatoes against a wall. And then you continue to throw tomatoes because it "worked" last time ... and if it doesn't rain then you just didn't throw enough tomatoes yet.

The most prevalent has got to be, "We prayed and -insert name- recovered - it's a miracle!

And if the person dies: "It's the will of God."

I can't believe nobody has said religion. All of it. Praying to god being a prime example.

Placebo buttons.

Some appliances like elevators or traffic crossings cycle automatically, but they still have (non-functional) buttons. If the buttons are removed, people complain that the wait is too long. Let them push a button while they wait, and they'll think it's much quicker.

Herbal supplements, magnets, crystals, horoscopes...

"that's the way we've always done it" at any job ever.

Cargo cult mentality?

Like how island natives after WWII would build ritual airstrips to summon American cargo planes.

The TSA

I X and it rained; for X in:

1. Washed the car
2. Hung out the washing
3. Watered the garden

I always liked the expression "asteroid insurance"

Nuclear weapons.

"Specious reasoning" is all I can think of. That's what Lisa Simpsons says when Homer thinks the Bear Patrol is working like a charm (because there's not a bear in sight).

Taking echinacia (sp?) to get rid of a cold. I've given up trying to tell my friends they're wasting their money because they believe it works, because they start feeling better, and won't be told that that was going to happen anyway.

All superstitions. Lucky charms (not the cereal). Curses (eg. Everytime I cheer for this sport team they lose, but they win when I don't cheer, so it must be a curse).

Average person Buying or Selling stock has an impact on the price of the stock.

gpupdate /force

Tapping the top of a can of soda to prevent it from making a mess when you open it.

Sounds like how dogs chase the mailman away.

All the rituals that baseball players perform.