I think the trouble is that even educated humans struggle to talk intelligently about medical and psychological problems. We all worry about our health and mortality, and the idea that a psychological or medical condition threatens your life is somewhere between an existential threat, and a worrying cloud over your life. As a result, people easily become wedded to the idea that a particular condition is affecting them, or someone close to them. And they lose their normal objectivity when it comes to swallowing up medical jargon and scientific-sounding names for nebulous psychological / educational phenomena.
I'm from a biology/healthcare background and come to HN for the interesting tech discussions, trivia and the different perspective. I've learnt loads over the past few years and got into a few amateur programming projects in my free time and I'm grateful for that. But I've stopped going to the comments section of anything related to my actual fields of knowledge because the comments are often so wrong/borderline crazy it's hard to know where to start. Makes me wonder if the comments on the tech stuff I don't know so much about are often just as bad but I can't tell...
Ok but I didn't intend my comment to be about HN readers; it's basically educated humans in western anglophone countries I'm criticizing. People just love giving scientific-sounding diagnoses to their problems in their lives, even totally nebulous things like children behaving badly or not doing well academically.
