Don't estimate your creative intelligence by your critical intelligence

Immensely harder to build something without a flaw than to find a flaw.

Also, I'll note that the criticisms we level while we review some work in privacy are not reviewed in their turn by anyone else. There should be some humility in your "gotcha" if it has never faced criticism of it's own.

On the other hand, if you're a very good critic, it becomes very hard to create something, as you see flaw after flaw after flaw, multiplying faster than you can fix them. I find it very hard.

I think there's something to that archtype of writers as drinkers. Got to shut off that critic if you want to get anything completed.

There is an old joke about an art critic, who was accused of how he dares to criticize the art of others when he himself is unable to produce any art. The answer: "I cannot lay eggs, but I can still tell if an egg is rotten".

Maps and territories. A noisy signal can still be understood, and the marginal cost of suppressing noise can become steep. Even mathematical proofs are often first communicated in a logically correct but "noisy" form, and simplified later.

I struggle with over-qualifying, to the point where my writing takes too long or is too hard for other people to understand. I actually wonder if prolific writers are selected for a certain lack of guilt, whereas I often feel like a scrupulous person, almost guilty for not addressing every little subtlety.

The collapse into the trivial is usually good news! The trivial is just the accurately concise, which depends on the power of your background knowledge. I'm a huge fan of SlateStarCodex, but sometimes I reach the end of a 10,000 word essay and wonder "Why did he just say APPLY META-LEVEL RATIONALITY CONCEPT TO TOPIC X?", but that's only trivial if you share the right background, while his audience is very broad.

“If P = NP, then the world would be a profoundly different place than we usually assume it to be. There would be no special value in ‘creative leaps,’ no fundamental gap between solving a problem and recognizing the solution once it’s found. Everyone who could appreciate a symphony would be Mozart; everyone who could follow a step-by-step argument would be Gauss; everyone who could recognize a good investment strategy would be Warren Buffett.” -Scott Aaronson

Good writers are not necessarily good critics. Just a different skill. You can be smart at one and dumb at the other.

A corollary to this is that it should be possible to find mistakes in the works of almost everyone. 

It is probably good practice to do this.

Seems like you're criticizing your own writing rather than writing. Are you a perfectionist?

I'm sorry to be so blunt, but why do you keep posting to Main material that clearly belongs in Discussion even after having been told not to do so repeatedly in the past?