I think pedantry lends itself to an additional negative effect worse than added friction: trapping your priors. If your cognitive circuits are over-indexed on identifying local mistakes, then it’s easy to dismiss something when it fails the most salient checks you’re running. This isn’t a particularly rationalist thing, but it does seem like the kind of thing where a rationalist vice lends itself to fewer people having identified / fixed a flaw than otherwise.
I think pedantry lends itself to an additional negative effect worse than added friction: trapping your priors. If your cognitive circuits are over-indexed on identifying local mistakes, then it’s easy to dismiss something when it fails the most salient checks you’re running. This isn’t a particularly rationalist thing, but it does seem like the kind of thing where a rationalist vice lends itself to fewer people having identified / fixed a flaw than otherwise.