I was more thinking about other areas like politics, management or software engineering issues. There it's often not possible to validate your model. It's even hard to tell if something goes well or not. And the feedback loop from decision to result can take years in many cases. So you pretty much are forced to do cargo culting.
In the matters that you're talking about, it may just be that we can't really know. Certain things take years to figure out (take Feynman's example of the Milikan value): people still −I assume− had to use some value while the "official" value was shifting.
I'm not sure I'd call that cargo culting necessarily. If the best case to be made right now is in favour of the majority position, then I think one should go with the majority position. I'd say that one should still keep a healthy dose of skepticism and be ready to change their mind if the balance of evidence changes… but then, it may be that managers/leaders need to feel committed and that a "healthy dose" for them is very, very little.