Comment by ratelimitsteve

Are you familiar with ship of theseus as an arugmentation fallacy? Innuendo Studios did a great video on it and I think that a lot of what you're talking about breaks down to this. Tldr - it's a fallacy of substitution, small details of an argument get replaced by things that are (or feel like) logical equivalents until you end up saying something entirely different but are arguing as though you said the original thing. In this video the example is "senator doxxes a political opponent" but on looking "senator" turns out to mean "a contractor working for the senator" and "doxxes a political opponent" turns out to mean "liked a tweet that had that opponent's name in it in a way that could draw attention to it".

Each change is arguably equivalent and it seems logical that if x = y then you could put y anywhere you have x, but after all of the changes are applied the argument that emerges is definitely different from the one before all the substitutions are made. It feels like communities that pride themselves on being extra rational seem subject to this because it has all the trappings of rationalism but enables squishy, feely arguments