"capacity for being pedantic"

I doubt one would get very far in any kind of serious debugging session without the ability to be pedantic. It doesn't mean we can't judge the time and place for it.

But people that are good at basketball do tend to be tall, and people that are good at programming quite possibly tend to be pedantic nits.

The inverse isn't always true. Correlation isnt causation, more than two points to a line, etc etc.

I never said that one caused the other, only that pedantry is necessary when writing correct computer programs.

Huge bugs can come from small mistakes. The bug that tripped up Colin and ended up as a story on HN a while back was nothing more than a missing ++ in his code. Yet that tiny mistake screwed up the security of his cryptography.