I hope this doesn't become status quo. Anecdotally, it seems like the vast majority of downvotes are for attitude issues rather than disagreement. Even in the case where someone is outright wrong ("blah blah, because 1+1=3"), they're far more likely to receive replies which (often politely) contradict what they're saying than they are to receive downvotes ("are you sure about that? wolfram [1] says 1+1=2"), as long as the incorrect commenter is being courteous participants in the conversation.
As someone who is so often so very, very wrong, I find this piece of our culture incredibly valuable, and I hope that it doesn't disappear.
Reflexive nitpicking and ankle-biting is completely orthogonal to, and can even obscure, the valuable discussions on the actual topic that you're referring to. It's a Signal:Noise problem, you're referring to Signal, me to Noise.
As someone who is so often so very, very wrong, I find this piece of our culture incredibly valuable, and I hope that it doesn't disappear.