Laurent Bossavit has a neat post about superstition in programming:
I’m fairly sure you could accurately gauge the maturity of a programming team by the amount of superstition in the source code they produce…
I would have loved to have thought of superstition as a good description in my previous, related post Quality nerds don’t believe in magic.
In the absence of undue pressure, reliance upon magic or the presence of many superstitions indicates an approach to work that is dangerous. The undue pressure part, as identified by Clarke Ching, is important. We all lose discipline and form when placed in impossible positions - relying on some magic and keeping superstitions alive is a reasonable thing to do if the alternative is immediate project failure (or worse).
Your earlier article about magic (right on target, btw) discussed nerds solving problems - or more accurately problems seeming to solve themselves; the link with superstition is probably less immediate in that context than in the context of warding off problems.