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A post from 2015 about how the Earth is flat is just as disingenuous as a post from 2020 about how the Earth is flat. I'm not sure how this is supposed to lead to automatically thoughtful discourse.

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Sturgeon's law: "90% of everything is crap". With the benefit of time it's easier to filter out the crap. New crap is shiny, old crap is stinky.

Sturgeon was talking about pop culture. There was a lot of crappy music composed contemporaneously with Bach, but the crap has been forgotten and only the good stuff survived.

These particular constraints may not be ideal, but AskHistorians has a similar restriction called the 20 years rule where discussion of events from the past two decades is verboten. It doesn't automatically make conversation thoughtful, but it's an easily enforced rule that largely precludes modern politics without sacrificing too many topics of interest.

There's still going to be controversy. For example, Turks not admitting Armenian genocide (~100 y.o.). Also, the winner writes history. I guess within those 20 years, the losers get mostly assimilated.

There are still things people care about outside that window, but it has the effect of giving people time to sort out evidence and write things that can be cited. You'll find that there are many posts taking apart those issues.

It does at least mean that you're limited to discussing flat earth posts that were able to stay online and findable for at least 5 years, which is a subset of all flat earth posts. So that's good!

Can't thoughtful discourse begin on a topic that is wrong, discussing why it is wrong? For example, I'd love to see a critique of what is wrong with:

http://alternativephysics.org/book/GPSmythology.htm

...which makes the claim that you don't need to correct for relativistic effects for GPS to work correctly. I don't see an immediate, obvious flaw in his thinking, so I think it would be great to have as a conversation starter with someone more knowledgeable.

In fact, thinking about it more, doesn't stack overflow essentially depend on people being wrong and needing correction?

The author isn't actually familiar with how GPS works. First, there's no timestamp transmitted by the satellite (aside from the nav message, which isn't used for this). The satellite time is estimated as an offset from receiver time. Secondly, relativity is compensated for by fixing the satellite clocks so you don't get that location drift. Thirdly, if you had a perfect clock and used a naive algorithm, yes you'd have problems with changing elevation or gravity. Fortunately, GPS accounts for both receiver clock offsets (whatever their cause), and drift in offsets over time. The receiver is also constantly adjusting its clock based on the satellite signal so that error never accumulates beyond acceptable limits.

Presumably, not by cutting down on old cruft but by cutting down on new cruft. I would think that requiring the post to stand some kind of "test of time" would cut down on quick-trending but shallow content in a lot of cases.

That's a good example of a post that probably wouldn't do well on such a site...you're right, time doesn't add much context to that topic.

Here's the secret, thoughtful discourse is hard work and will never be "automatic" :)

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