Not that credentials are the be all end all, but what's different about this person vs anyone who's posting at SeekingAlpha, or any of the investing sub reddits?
Both authors are quite witty, so their blogs are eminently readable. They're also trained in economics (have PhDs in economics) and are econ professors, so I put a lot more stock in the stuff they write (useful heuristic, but some may disagree) than in lynalden's posts.
Economics is harder to separate from politics compared to other sciences, so it's especially useful to read multiple points of view and understand what the biases of authors lie/what the ongoing debates are. One thing I dislike about lynalden is her tendency to present as the one "true" economics Milton Friedman's monetarist theory of inflation, and doing so without explicitly calling out the hidden assumptions being made along the way or considering other theories of economics (e.g. Keynesian). OTOH, Noah and Brad can be categorized as Keynesian economists, so they present a more left-leaning view of the field of economics where the quantity theory of money is not accepted whole cloth.
Relevant example: They were surprised by non-transitory inflation, she was not. That's a huge miss by other economists.
Reasoning from first principles (applying a priori dogma) and being bound by reality (responding to empirical cues) are generally opposed, the exception is when the dogmas are laid down by people who are bound by reality.
Much (but not all) engineering work is bounded by reality inherently because there is quick and non-murky feedback when it is wrong; this is a feature of the work, not the worker. Engineers working in economics (and even moreso in economic punditry than actual policy, though it's true either way) don't get that. And the available “first principle” dogmas they can choose to apply are either intentional pedagogical simplifications, poorly tested against reality by comparison to anything in most domains of engineering, or flatly falsified, often ideologically motivated, ideas.
That puts her in good company with pretty much all of the world's most respected economists.
I'll stop here.
An economist placing bets on the market puts money where their mouth is, so should just write whatever they think is true.
She puts the money where her mouth is and outperforms the average professional by a considerable margin. Gotta respect that.