It's like those HN commenters who just spew links to cherry picked sources at you when you call them out for misleading people. It's an only slightly obfuscated attempt to move the goalposts from "hey idiot take a step back and look at the big picture, your core point is garbage and you're a bad person for even making it" type argument to one of implicitly accepting their premise and then bickering over sources (in the case of the filthy linkposters) or the exact nature of the minutia and excruciating detail they have produced in droves (in the case of the rationalists).

That said I consider the rationalists a little bit higher brow since they're at least DIYing (or were before AI) the words and the arguments and responsible for all that verbosity whereas any idiot can cherry pick links.