[luso_brazilian]

It reminds me of the XY problem [1] that plagues both our field and any other field where one can devise a solution to a problem without formalism or thoroughly understanding what's being solved.

> The XY problem is asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem. This leads to enormous amounts of wasted time and energy, both on the part of people asking for help, and on the part of those providing help.

> - User wants to do X.

> - User doesn't know how to do X, but thinks they can fumble their way to a solution if they can just manage to do Y.

> - User doesn't know how to do Y either.

> - User asks for help with Y.

> - Others try to help user with Y, but are confused because Y seems like a strange problem to want to solve.

> - After much interaction and wasted time, it finally becomes clear that the user really wants help with X, and that Y wasn't even a suitable solution for X.

I'm sure that's not the name of the phenomenon you are asking but it is certainly a closely related one.

[1] http://xyproblem.info/

[StavrosK]

Yep, that is very closely related, just not exactly that. Mine goes something like:

- We need to improve X, something that is easy to measure improvement in.

- I've noticed that Y somewhat correlates with X.

- Let's make an effort to improve Y!