I remember thinking of him as a skillful writer and a sometimes incisive thinker, back then. Apparently my taste has significantly improved in the interim; for a piece ostensibly about complexity, this is an embarrassingly superficial analysis from priors that already don't make any sense.

I'm not going to knock a guy today based on an almost twenty-year-old piece, especially on subjects (cannabis legalization, the quality and direction of Obama administration policy initiatives) that were widely misunderstood at the time, including by such luminaries as the Nobel committee. But Yegge really wasn't starting from so strong a position as I had misrecalled. Thanks for the link.