You can often read it on HN actually. Quite often you'll see people offering word-of-mouth solution to a problem, and the comments following will dismiss it for being pseudo-science, request "link to studies", etc.

Too much of good thing can be a bad thing.

I think that goes back to the "why and how it works". A home remedy has a neutral value to me until I have evidence, and my own anecdotal evidence doesn't have a lot of value to me - when I have a cold eating a gallon tub of ice cream would make me feel better for a time, but it doesn't actually help anything and is generally a bad idea.

Next time you have a cold, I recommend sleeping all day. It's worked great for me!

That's because word-of-mouth is very capable of transmitting abject nonsense and fantasy. If you're going to be taking some medicine, you should be sure it isn't, and the way to do that is with thorough study & evaluation.

Not the point. The point is that we are the opposite of the facebook mum. She believes anything that is posted without evidence, while we don't dare to even try something without 4 white papers.

It's especially funny given that meditation, psychedelic and open source software were all ridiculed concepts 30 years ago, and now we are promoting them in this very comment section.

I am not promoting them, nor would I. Obviously, this is a mixed community, and you cannot paint it with such a broad brush.

We also have too many "essential oils" and homeopathy from world-of-mouth. It cuts both ways.

Yes, and this Firefox things was not serious when it was called Phoenix. And meditation ? Hippie crap. Ah, this fasting stuff is dangerous grandma shenanigans.

We are going to much in the extreme, and missing on many very useful thing, just because the people introducing it to us are not scientific credible sources.

The question is - does meditation make your life better in the same ratio that bleach enemas and black tar treatments for cancer make your life worse?

I'm assuming the average HN reader can assess the risk of trying something unusual out. Since we are, after all, talking about this community.