Apophenia: The enemy of evidence-based management?

Finally, we might have a name for the phenomenon we've been combating all this time: apophenia. From Wikipedia: "Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad¹, who defined it as... a 'specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness'." 
¹Brugger, Peter. "From Haunted Brain to Haunted Science: A Cognitive Neuroscience View of Paranormal and Pseudoscientific Thought," Hauntings and Poltergeists: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, edited by J. Houran and R. Lange (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2001). [Note: There's a 2007 edition on amazon.]

The Lostpedia on Wikia (about the TV show Lost), describes apophenia as the "perception of patterns, or connections, where in fact none exist. Most psychologists agree that this condition exists in everyone, to some degree; it is a bias of the human mind." They refer to the Wikipedia page.

Happy Fun-with-Evidence Friday. So is it time for a smackdown between EBEs (Evidence-Based Enthusiasts) and Apophenites?

Oops, not so fast. Not everyone uses this term pejoratively: A social media researcher named Danah Boyd describes apophenia as "making connections where none previously existed" - well, that sounds okay... isn't that what research, innovation, and discovery are all about? Boyd also has the apophenia.com domain.

And finally, on SourceForge there's Apophenia: An open statistical library for scientific computing. It has "functions on the same level as those of typical statistics packages (OLS, Probit...)".