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Thomas comments on Personal examples of semantic stopsigns - Less Wrong Discussion
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Beside the stop signs, the detour signs are also very popular and widely used.
Maybe even more.
A: I hear, supernovae are not extreme enough environment to produce gold. Neutron stars collisions are required.
B: What's the recent gold price? Is it going up or down?
That's not really a rationality issue. That's people implicitly saying "I don't know anything about this subject or find it boring. Here's something else I'd rather talk about."
I read that response as saying: gold price is affected by how much gold is out there. If we thought gold was only produced by extremely rare events like neutron star collisions, we couldn't explain the amount of gold apparently present on Earth; and we would conclude there's less gold than we thought (perhaps people are passing something else as gold). The price of "true" gold should go up if this new physical theory is confirmed. If it's going down, people disbelieve the theory.
Alternatively you could read that as saying: the price of gold isn't astronomical, because it's not astronomically rare; that is strong evidence against your new theory that gold is only produced by astronomically rare events.
That seems a legitimately related subject, not "here's something else I'd rather talk about."