How do we handle questions about conspiracies that contain engineering topics?

Question

I took a quick look around and I couldn't find previous discussion, so I thought I would bring this up.

I was inspired by this question, which asks about whether jet fuel can melt steel beams (yes, it's that kind of question). While that particular question didn't seem to be asked in good faith, there are many people out there who could benefit from some engineering insight into common conspiracies like this.

That question got a lot of downvotes, probably because the asker didn't really put much effort into it beyond giving some statistic on fuel temperatures, and became combative when an answer was given. However, the downvotes may have also been a sign of displeasure from the community; after all the particular "fuel temperature" problem is often discussed and much-maligned.

My question is: assuming the questions and answers are properly moderated (avoiding spam, speculation, and insults) how should the community handle these questions?

Should we try to give a solid engineering answer and move on? Should they be marked as off-topic (maybe Skeptics SE is a better place for them)? Or should we treat them as spam and close them?

I'm looking for some solid discussion about a problem that will likely not go away, we might as well think about how to deal with it now.

Answer 1

In theory, if the technical question in the problem statement can stand on its own merits as a useful bit of Q&A, I think it's reasonable to address any problems with the non-technical portions of the problem statement via edits.

In practice, however, this can be a challenge. Particularly when the author of the question opposes constructive edits and/or technically accurate answers in favor of pushing a non-technical agenda. In which case it's reasonable for us not to invest an unlimited amount of time and effort into massaging either the content or the user's experience of the site.

In the case at hand, the author asked "Is the 911 story plausible?" and wrote not so much an engineering problem statement as a bunch of leading questions. Nonetheless, the author received a high-quality answer from a technical expert and responded by arguing with that expert in comments, eventually resorting to insults. In cases such as these we stop worrying about the question and just smack the user and all their content right off the face of the site.

In a hypothetical alternative case where the author was either genuinely interested in the underlying technical question or not actively opposing constructive edits and answers, our best approach might be to minimize or eliminate the sociopolitical context and focus strictly on the technical aspect of the question. If a question is inspired by 9/11 conspiracy theories, one brief introductory sentence mentioning that inspiration is probably as much sociopolitical context as would ever be useful.

Answer 2

Questions of that sort are usually straw men to validate already drawn conclusions.

If the questions were high quality and heavily moderated by the community, I could see that we might be able to generate constructive questions along those lines.

If the questions aren't high quality to begin with, "off-topic", "unclear", or "too broad" are useful close reasons depending upon how the question is posed.

Generally speaking, the OPs tend to be rather antagonistic which thwarts the community's efforts. And in those cases, we should treat the users like any other user that is actively working against the community - we show them the door.

Community members can flag comments as "rude or offensive" or "not constructive" as necessary, which can be useful for community moderation. Moderator flags are always an option as well; your humble site janitors have additional tools to clean things up more quickly.

In the example case, the OP made it clear that they were not interested in constructive Q&A.