Hacker News Reader

They probably got some fMRI, and they framed it in terms of cortisol, adrenaline and cytokines.

Old knowledge is useless to modern science, we need to continually re-express it in the modish jargon of the day or people won't accept it as true. Thus, generations of studies restating the same old crap with new methods.

View on HN

This is good!

It sucks as a learner. But for science and progress of knowledge, it provides an inefficient but lacks-false-positives mechanism.

It sucks for Liebniz, but was a positive for our understanding

No, it isn't good. It is brittle and dogmatic, and these dogmas are often thinly-evidenced ("now we know stress is all about cortisol levels!"). It means vast categories of human knowledge are regularly discarded without understanding or examination because of epistemological prejudice. And the process is not by any means lacking in false positives; this presumes that our current modes of knowledge are actually better, less error-prone, etc., than the forms of knowledge they are refusing to countenance, which they often are not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com