Your analogy is correct in that wearing the same pair of "lucky" socks is exactly akin to and has the same effectiveness as the TOI and the CTE systems. It helps some people, but not because it does anything outside of making them focus more or just giving them confidence and a placebo effect. The socks themselves aren't a help in any way.
Where your analogy breaks down is that by telling the player that his same pair of lucky socks are not improving his performance for any reasons that aren't all in is head is not always going to have a negative affect on his performance. A good portion will realize you are right and will start to concentrate on legitimate things instead of hocus pocus stuff like the same pair of lucky socks and will benefit and improve more because of it.
Where it also breaks down is that sometimes a different type of sock is actually better in and of itself, so sometimes it isn't just that wearing those same pair of lucky socks isn't helping the performance, but that regardless of what the athlete believes in his head those same pair of lucky socks are actually hindering his performance.
And where your analogy really breaks down even further is that even if telling people to stop wearing their same pair of lucky socks might affect the performance of some of the people that were already doing it, it still doesn't justify teaching the nonsense of wearing the same pair of lucky socks to the people that haven't picked up that habit yet. Our focus should be on teaching things that will actually legitimately help improve their performance and trying to dissuade them from putting focus into nonsense that is of no real help.
So yes, wearing the same pair of lucky socks helps some people just because they believe in it even though it doesn't really help in any way outside of that, but wouldn't it make a ton more sense to just get them to believe in what actually will legitimately help them instead? And even more so when they haven't even picked up the habit of wearing the same pair of socks yet? That way they still get the benefits that come with simply believing in it, as they would with the socks, PLUS they get the benefit of it actually helping because it actually helps.
The answer course is that this makes not only the most sense, but the only sense, but yet you want to continue trying to teach everyone the "wearing the same pair of socks" method instead of the methods that actually have benefits outside of what you get just by believing it it.
