There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.
I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?
The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.
Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.
Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.
Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.
Distributed computing Build systems.
Poem about character conversion.
I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.
No one (so far as we know) chooses whether there are to be earthquakes.
People do choose whether to start wars, increase or decrease minimum wages, levy new taxes, etc. (Governments choose directly; in democracies, their electorates choose indirectly.)
I don't know to what extent people in government are thinking ethically when contemplating foreign and economic policy, though they frequently claim they are. I am fairly sure that when I vote, I am greatly influenced by my estimates of the candidates' parties' likely foreign and economic policy, and that I am thinking in ethical terms about what policies would be best.
Of course I may be fooling myself about that, and the politicians may certainly be lying about what drives their policies. But the same is true on "social" issues. I don't know of any reason to be more confident that (say) abortion policy is really more driven by politicians' or voters' ethics than (say) taxation policy.
You can examine their decisions ("revealed preferences") and check whether they require ethical imperatives as an explanation or they can perfectly well be explained without considering ethics.
I appreciate that this is not a trivial exercise (e.g. distinguishing between "we cannot ethically do that" and "we cannot do that for the sake of keeping up appearances" is going to be difficult), but so is much of real-life analysis.