You have a narrow perspective that says there is no value in sprinkling your car with water to keep it safe. That’s your choice. Another, might intuit that the religious ceremony has been shown throughout their lives, to confer divine protection. Yet a third might recognize an intentional performance where safety is top of mind, might program a person to be more safety conscious, thereby causing more safe outcomes with the object in persons who have performed the ritual, and further they may also suspect that many performers of such ritual privately understand the practice as being metaphorical, despite what they say publicly. Yet a fourth may not understand the situation like the third, but may have learnt that when large numbers of people do something, there may be value that they don’t understand, so they will give it a try.

The optimization strategy with jumps is analogous to the fourth, we can call it ‘intellectual humility and openness’. Some say it’s the basis of the scientific method, ie throw out a hypothesis and test it with an open mind.