Well, it surely looks like it seeing level of argument he presents and lack of logical consistency in his writing. Even in this article he claims SD doesn't model real world as well as MAD and then as arguments ask you what would you do if you were asked to calculate... MAD, you would clearly see it's not SD :-)
His latest book is worse than the article and my conclusion about him being and idiot is based mainly on it.
Here is one gem from his book:

>>True, while humans self-repair, they eventually wear out (hopefully leaving their
genes, books, or some other information behind—another discussion). But the
phenomenon of aging is misunderstood, largely fraught with mental biases and logical
flaws. We observe old people and see them age, so we associate aging with their loss
of muscle mass, bone weakness, loss of mental function, taste for Frank Sinatra music,
and similar degenerative effects. But these failures to self-repair come largely from
maladjustment—either too few stressors or too little time for recovery between them—
and maladjustment for this author is the mismatch between one’s design and the
structure of the randomness of the environment (what I call more technically its
“distributional or statistical properties”). What we observe in “aging” is a combination
of maladjustment and senescence, and it appears that the two are separable—
senescence might not be avoidable, and should not be avoided (it would contradict the
logic of life, as we will see in the next chapter); maladjustment is avoidable. Much of
aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort—a disease of
civilization: make life longer and longer, while people are more and more sick. In a
natural environment, people die without aging—or after a very short period of aging.
For instance, some markers, such as blood pressure, that tend to worsen over time for
moderns do not change over the life of hunter-gatherers until the very end.
And this artificial aging comes from stifling internal antifragility.

In which he claims aging is misunderstood and proposes his new theory that it comes from too few stressors or too little recovery. Then he says that "Much of aging comes from a misunderstanding of the effect of comfort - a disease of civilization".
Really ? Aging comes from misunderstanding ?
This is just random babbling, there is no sense in it. Reasonable people don't write or talk like this and those who do with such conviction as him are called... well, idiots.

>polyglot who writes classical Greek, Arabic, French, English and can do advanced statistical modeling is clearly an idiot right?

If he is in fact a polyglot and in fact can do advanced statistical modelling (the latter I very much doubt, the former I have no idea about) maybe he is not an idiot but some mental illness is taking a toll on him which makes him write and talk like one.
The thing is there is no continuity, what he sees as arguments don't even address the point. It's just stream of words without any essence or meaning. I mean again, read the paragraph I quoted.. it's not even cherry picked. There are worse (like the one about depression or academia). The whole book is like that and article from OP just continues the trend.