Pedants are a dime a dozen. It takes little intellectual firepower to memorize the logical fallacies well enough to ‘find’ them everywhere, or to reflexively demand sources and attributions for every claim or conjecture, or to seize on some immaterial discrepancy to ‘win’ an argument whose substance one hasn’t even perceived – let alone attempted to understand well enough to counter. The measure of wisdom is not that one can poke holes in the arguments of others, but that having discovered a hole, one can offer constructive guidance for how they can patch it. Pedantic ‘gotcha games’ don’t prove intellectual superiority, they just demonstrate a shallow intellectual vanity.
— Avery Easton