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Some recent examples:

Question: What should we do about questions that show no evidence of prior research and contain assertions contrary to fact but are nonetheless interesting/salvageable?

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    $\begingroup$ All those questions have answers and all of them even have positive scores. Even I only downvoted one of them, apparently. Is there an issue with how they're being handled? $\endgroup$
    – Erin Anne
    Commented Oct 8 at 9:37
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    $\begingroup$ sorry, at the risk of being redundant (I'm about to go to sleep and worry I haven't made sense in my previous comment): were these not salvaged? I'm looking at the histories now--one (I'm guessing automatically because of its brevity) went into the Low Quality queue but passed through that. Corrections to false statements seem to have come in the comments and answers, as I'd expect. $\endgroup$
    – Erin Anne
    Commented Oct 8 at 9:53
  • $\begingroup$ @ErinAnne What happens if a dozen more people start asking questions based on zero research and containing assertions contrary to easily looked-up facts? At what point does this stop being Stack Exchange? Once one user establishes a pattern, anybody else can argue they don't need to follow basic tenets of SE question-asking because so-and-so doesn't have to. $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Commented Oct 8 at 10:00
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    $\begingroup$ I guess the community will react if the questions stop being interesting/salvageable? Though I don't know, I was surprised the Titan rover one wasn't called a duplicate of the Titan Rover Survival Challenges question, but I guess the Hot Network Question status might've made the six(!) downvotes not enough. hmm. $\endgroup$
    – Erin Anne
    Commented Oct 8 at 10:06

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Absent any actual rule violations, I don't see an alternative to just downvoting, correcting whatever misconceptions either in the answers or comments, asking for more research to be done in the future, and maybe directly appealing to the community in meta that you don't like the questions being asked?

I don't really see the threat of "anybody else can argue they don't need to follow basic tenets of SE question-asking because so-and-so doesn't have to." A person doing that is doing research by actually reading other peoples' questions, and these people are not. You've been here longer than I have (or you've been active longer than I have; I'm not going to check) but my experience is that people usually just break the rules as is convenient for them if they're going to.

"At what point does this stop being Stack Exchange?" This all sounds very much in-pattern to StackExchange for me. It's really not unusual for questioners to have misconceptions or not do research. I believe some users lost their question-asking abilities because of the downvotes doing so generated. But if the community votes it up, then I guess folks don't mind the misconceptions, or the opportunity to correct them, or whatever. Maybe that'll change over time; I think I've personally witnessed no less than five distinct people for whom "oh no, not another question from [person]" has clearly happened across the community.

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    $\begingroup$ Your 1st paragraph is pretty much what I was going to write. Downvotes and Edits are key. $\endgroup$
    – Rory Alsop Mod
    Commented Oct 12 at 11:30
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    $\begingroup$ @RoryAlsop I left the edit bit out of my answer; I think I've edited something out of a question before (and I forget why I thought I should) but most of the time I think editing the ideas of a question should be left to the author $\endgroup$
    – Erin Anne
    Commented Oct 12 at 14:52
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For the question "Why are they putting insulating blankets around the new space coronagraph?"

the first version was based on an assertion contrary to fact:

But the device is already in the best insulation of all, a vacuum.

The question was salvageable. After some pushback by several users in comments, an other user edited and improved the question. Since then, the question went on to receive answers, upvotes, and HNQ status.

The OP in question and I have had discussions about the need for some prior research and basic factual integrity in questions both here and in Astronomy SE and a review of comments on visible and deleted questions over the past several months will show that I've always advised on these points.

Stack Exchange does take getting used-to, and for new users I try to work hard to encourage and help them adjust when I can. But the OP in question is not a new user to Stack Exchange.

I wrote this post to point out a repeat pattern of false premise-based questions in quick succession. I started with comments to the OP, then when those were perceived as personal attacks I moved to meta so that the issue could be addressed by other users.

Those with longer memories will recognize that I'm pretty familiar with seeing constructive criticism as personal attacks myself(!), and over time Stack Exchange has helped me to learn to start looking beyond how everything affects me, and to start to see how I affect everyone else.

While autism is quite a fascinating and diverse set of differences it does bring with it some pretty common challenges, one of which is understanding our impacts on others. We have just as much empathy as anyone else, but due to (let's call it) signal processing issues, we don't always "get it" about what's happening or choose the best course of action. We often feel more compelled to change the world one bit at a time to suit us.

That can often be a great, wonderful thing in some cases (think Greta Thunberg and Elon Musk) and a real imposition on everyone else in other cases (also think Elon Musk).

Learning to work within a structure, and how to operate within some constraints that everyone else agrees to operate within does have its advantages in life.

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