Ross Douthat points me to this Reason piece which eviscerates a "Google Pundit." I'm not too interested in the details of the article itself, rather, I like the term, and would add "Wikipedia Pundit" as another flavor of the same species. It's a problem everyone suffers from now and then, the urge to win the most pressing argument, but over the long term this sort of behavior doesn't add any value to one's own understanding of the issues at hand (and what else really matters?). This is of course not to denigrate the worth of Google or Wikipedia, but a monkey with a powerful computer is still a monkey. Especially in relation to social science questions it is almost trivially easy to find some "authority" who supports any given position.