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thomblake comments on Defecting by Accident - A Flaw Common to Analytical People - Less Wrong
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Line in the sand time. I can stomach advice to "let unimportant untruths slide" in other fora, but not here. Falsehoods left unchecked can cascade and corrupt one's entire epistemic landscape. If you're lucky, on encountering an inconsistency in your beliefs, you'll have a good enough framework to update in the right direction, but not all of us are so fortunate.
Can you think of any realistic example of how the specific mistaken belief that those two books had the same author could contribute to a cascade that would corrupt their entire epistemic landscape? Because it's certainly not difficult to see how a habit of confronting others on issues they see as trivial could cause them to marginalize your opinion, leading to a great loss of utility. Remember, we're not just trying to maximize truth, but utility, and if you're not advocating truth for an actual purpose, your rationality will be of little use.