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Notes -
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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