"Arrogance" could mean different things.
One is closing your mind -- "I know this to be so and no empirical facts will make me change my mind!" That seems to be unambiguously bad.
Another is showing disdain for others -- "What such a stupid creature like you could possibly know about this?" That can certainly by justified (I recommend reading comments on popular sites such as YouTube if you doubt this), but also has obvious failure modes. There are additional complications here as arrogance in this sense is often seen and/or used as a form of status signaling.
Yet another is thinking you know better -- "Hold mah beer and watch this!" In this sense Jackass is all about arrogant people. This meaning boils down to the willingness to take large risks in highly uncertain situations and the value of this characteristic is debatable. I think I can make an argument that this is a personally dangerous but socially priceless trait -- you do want to have mad experimenters around, though you would not necessarily want to be one yourself.
I have this belief that humility is a part of good critical thinking, and that egoism undermines it. I imagine arrogance as a kind of mind-death. But I have no evidence, and no good mechanism by which it might be true. In fact, I know the belief is suspect because I know that I want it to be true — I want to be able to assure myself that this or that intolerable academic will be magically punished with a decreased capacity to do good work. The truth could be the opposite: maybe hubris breeds confidence, and confidence results? After all, some of the most important thinkers in history were insufferable.
Is any link, positive or negative, between arrogance and reasoning too tenuous to be worth entertaining? Is humility a pretty word or a valuable habit? I don't know what I think yet. Do you?