To me it is about gaslighting and arguing for the sake of arguing. We’ve long been in this realm of society now where nobody wants facts or truths, they just want you to be wrong. I have before, cited resources in arguments I’ve shamefully invested in, knowing that it will not matter in the end. Because I’m still going to be called a liar, I’m still going to be subjected to insults and be baited and gaslit.
And the same people still turn around and expect credible sources to be provided to them? Why ask when you don’t care?
It is one thing for someone to make outrageous, blatant and unclaimed arguments than it is another who talks of something and it has a resemblance of truth to it.
I think the breakdown in communication is due to a difference in how people’s brains have been trained to accept something as “true”. Some people embrace the scientific method, while others are dogmatic.
To elaborate, I imagine you (aspire to) readily alter your personal beliefs to fit the data you’ve observed. But that is a foreign concept to some people. In order to utilize the scientific method, you need to be appropriately trained in it, and you need the intellect to apply it. But if you’re lacking in either department, you still need to be able to function day-to-day, to dress yourself, do your job, pay bills, and just stay alive. No one has time to think critically about every single challenge they’re presented, so our default behaviour is to create heuristics which can be reused multiple times without needing to think.
The difference between science enjoyers and dogma stans is that the latter group slowly learned over their lifetime that heuristics helped them function in life more than relying on their ability to reason; and now not only do they depend on the exchange of heuristics between others in their group (their “ingroup” as-it-were) in order to function, but they assume everyone operates that way (it’s all they know). The scientific method is a just a vocab term they forgot in middle school, and the idea of re-evaluating your beliefs is frowned upon, because that means you must have bad heuristics!
So back to your original question, I believe the confusion happens because you and they have different implied meanings when you each ask for a source of information: You ask because you want new evidence that might change your conclusions about a subject. But they ask because they seek to discredit your source of heuristics. In their experience, if someone told them X, but then later that person turned out to be wrong, then that’s enough reason to doubt X. That’s their heuristic for doubt, so that’s their goal, to make a map of your ingroup and try to foster doubt within it.
That is the only reason in their mind that they would ever have to know your sources, the concept of empiricism is mostly foreign to them.