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I really have to disagree. Yudkowsky always came across to me as a very good writer, and while it's fashionable to dunk on HPMOR, I'm in the camp of it unironically being a fantastic novel, with excellent writing.
Yudkowsky can be accused of many things, but not being very intelligent (>140 IQ?) or a good writer are unfounded as far as I'm concerned.
(Personally, I think I'm a good writer, and I have heaps of medals and trophies to attest to that, including competitions where I beat out hundreds of thousands if not millions of others in my cohort. And I happily concede that he's a better writer than I am, a person who has been complimented on his writing many times over.)
I do wish he took better care of his presentation though, even as someone who sees themselves above such petty status games as not wearing a fedora, the sheer stakes means he really ought to do better. But just because he's capable of writing uber-cool antagonists who are simultaneously competent and charming doesn't mean he can do the same IRL..
Writing quality can mean a dozen different things. Sometimes it's just 'adherence to a certain style'. Sometimes it's about 'telling a good story'. Sometimes it's about efficiently communicating what's important and cutting what's not.
Yud's "good writing" isn't 1 or 3. But he tells good stories - HPMOR's enduring popularity speaks to that. And he presents novel/interesting ideas in engaging ways. I don't think the 70th percentile nyrb writer has written, or would write if they tried, something as persistently popular as HPMOR or the sequences (but could be wrong about that)
Evidence for Yud's intelligence is less his writing, though, than the ideas within the writing. His AI risk ideas were useful and prescient, and the correct parts being mixed with nonsense (the agent foundations stuff) is par for the course for novel ideas. And the sequences cover a lot of different complicated ideas pretty well. The ways he is (or was) wrong about e.g. quantum physics or the applicability of decision theory and mathematical logic to AI are the ways a smart person is wrong, not a dumb one.
He fails in the way a smart person who's dramatically overconfident and lacks experience in competitive fields fails. He is not regularized. In humans this is called «crackpottery». Sometimes even pro scientists fail like that, but it's a separate failure mode to their normal underperformances.
Yud really had to go to school and internalize that in some hard cases he, no matter his SAT at 11, can't «intuit» shit before reading the fuck more and even finishing some lab courses. Or at least he should've gone the pure math route and then returned to grand theories. I do buy that he has the brain for it. It's a shame.
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Perhaps I'm not sure what you mean by "quality of writing", but when I look at the quality of the ideas expressed in his writing I can't think of anyone parallel. If he invented half of the concepts he claims to then he would be the greatest philosopher of the modern age.
I suppose his prose doesn't have "great literary qualities" or whatever, but every time I pull up There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence I read the whole thing. If it seems boring and trite in the year of our lord 2023, it is only because the entire field of non-academic AI philosophy is built out of the Yudkowskian paradigm.
Nor do I believe that this is a case of deep subject-level knowledge alone. I have read his takes on current events. He is shockingly cogent even there
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In the interest of charity I'll say that rafa maybe has a more refined (patrician?) palette than most and naturally high standards, but I agree with you. I have long said Yud should stick to writing fiction, it's where his talent and passion lies.
He’s smart enough to pursue his main interests, i.e. writing Harry Potter fanfic and accessible introductions to philosophy. Which is really all that matters at the end of the day.
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