ETA: I've updated my position since writing this comment and no longer endorse it; see this comment.

I agree with Lumifer and shminux's comments. More generally, this does not seem like the sort of thing that you should be making conclusions about without taking a look at actual data when actual data is easily available. I recommend Neihart (1999). At best, the picture is a lot more nuanced than you're making it out to be, and at worst, you're regurgitating a cached thought: "Gifted children are poorly adjusted compared to their peers." The closest thing to this in the literature is the correlation between highly creative adults and psychopathology, particularly mood disorders, psychosis, and suicidality; not more general giftedness and social competence. There isn't enough evidence to conclude that this generalizes, in terms of populations, to highly intelligent individuals of all ages or to highly creative, or more generally, highly intelligent, children; or that this generalizes, in terms of individual characteristics, to social competence.

As for giftedness and measurements of psychological adjustment besides social competence, most studies have found little correlation between depression, anxiety, or suicidality and giftedness, and what correlation there is errs on the side of gifted children being better-adjusted than their average peers. Gifted children are also far less likely to engage in deviant behavior.

As for social competence, it's diverse among gifted persons. We can't conclude that either intelligence or personality factors are the primary causal factor in any purported correlation between the two and social competence. That is, your model is "Gifted children are highly intelligent. Gifted children are dissimilar from their peers because they are highly intelligent. Their peers ostracize them because they are dissimilar. Ostracized children engage in less social interaction. Gifted children have poor social skills because they have less experience with social interaction." A similarly plausible model is: "Some gifted children feel dissimilar from their peers. Gifted children who feel dissimilar from their peers are less likely to interact with their peers. Gifted children who interact less have poor social skills." And it can be both, and/or something else. There's also some evidence that verbally precocious children are less socially competent, or at least perceive themselves so, than mathematically precocious children. Finally, a big confounder in this entire field of inquiry is the correlation between high socioeconomic class and giftedness; it's hard to get a large control group that isn't also more socioeconomically heterogeneous than the experimental group.

If we're going to armchair psychologize, then I much prefer Paul Graham's model. High-IQ societies suffer from the same deficiency as public schools and prisons: their selection criteria are neither the motives of their members nor individual characteristics highly correlated with particular motives, groups composed of individuals with diffuse motives are directionless, and directionless groups that are prevented from decomposing into smaller more purposeful groups degenerate into unadulterated status games.

This community has a tendency to speculate wildly, especially about psychology and sociology. This can be useful. Sometimes there's no data to look at. But when there's data to look at, you should look at it. Jonah, do you disagree that this article has unnecessarily low epistemic standards? Usually when this criticism is made, you point out that you are still explaining and not yet defending, but there are clear misunderstandings of psychopathology, as detailed below by Lumifer, and direct contradictions with empirical evidence, as I have detailed above, so I don't see how that response would be applicable in this context.

I've withdrawn my downvote and updated towards the hypothesis that the sort of gifted children to which you are referring tend to have lower social competence than their peers. I didn't follow the link to Towers's The Outsiders because it is not a social norm for readers to follow all of the links in the articles here, and I assumed (rightfully, I think) that you were quoting everything relevant to your article.

When Jonah is talking about giftedness, he is not talking about the usual measure of IQ >=130 (some studies use IQ >=125). He is talking about IQ >= 155, 1 in 10,000; or at least those are the studies that he's implicitly citing. On this interpretation of Jonah's claim, there is evidence.

You have to indicate this! I feel like this is going to bring up the explaining vs. defending distinction again, but that is a huge, easily mentionable difference! And instead of or in addition to quoting Towers's essay, which looks like pure conjecture out of context, you could have cited some of those numbers from Terman or Hollingworth.

Dauber & Benbow (1990) has a good bibliography if you know where to look. Austin & Draper (1981) looks like it's probably a good review of this kind of research, if a bit dated, but I can't find a non-paywalled link. Each of the studies that I've seen seem to have weaknesses, but there are quite a few and it seems that their individual weaknesses are different.

Considering all of that, I would ask how relevant that research is to you or the community. In earlier articles you talked about being amazed by children with that 1 in 10,000 sort of ability, which makes me think that you aren't in that sort of range, and the LW average is 138 last time I checked. If social competence is really relevant to you and your audience, then we should be looking at the research I linked before for explanations.

The review I linked in my other comment talks about educational fit as a much greater factor in adjustment problems than giftedness in and of itself, and you even personally experienced this:

When I was in elementary school, I would often fall short of answering all questions correctly on timed arithmetic tests. Multiple teachers told me that I needed to work on making fewer "careless mistakes." I was puzzled by the situation – I certainly didn't feel as though I was being careless. In hindsight, I see that my teachers were mostly misguided on this point. I imagine that their thinking was:

"He knows how to do the problems, but he still misses some. This is unusual: students who know how to do the problems usually don't miss any. When there's a task that I know how to do and don't do it correctly, it's usually because I'm being careless. So he's probably being careless."

If so, their error was in assuming that I was like them. I wasn't missing questions that I knew how to do because I was being careless. I was missing the questions because my processing speed and short-term memory are unusually low relative to my other abilities. With twice as much time, I would have been able to get all of the problems correctly, but it wasn't physically possible for me to do all of the problems correctly within the time limit based on what I knew at the time. (The situation may have been different if I had had exposure to mental math techniques, which can substitute for innate speed and accuracy.)

That in tandem with personality factors seems like an equally plausible explanation for many people.

If lack of social skills were the only part of autism this might be onto something. But autism tends to be a cluster of symptoms, which aren't explainable by a lack of social interactions. For example, autistic people tend to have different sensory perception. I would not expect that symptom to appear from early isolation.

Alternative hypothesis 2

(At this point I should point out that I like your hypothesis, I just think it is not necessarily single-cause)

Satoshi Kanazawa's charmingly simple theory that general intelligence tends to suppress and displace most of your instincts. This means being smart pretty much automatically means being bad at a lot of things. The way I interpret it is that attention is a finite resource and you either pay attention to your analytical engine or your instincts or share it, but you cannot give full 100% attention to both. So if the analytical engine demands your attention the insticts shut up/down.

I have observed intelligent people being bad at the following instinctive things (not all of them, not in all of these):

• social skills
• motoric skills, hand-eye coordination like basketball
• 3D geometry i.e. toolmanship, fixing the plumbing or the lawn mower at home, being a handyman
• drawing
• music, singing
• balance
• rythm, dancing

Are you claiming that genetics isn't the main cause of high-IQ autism, or that autism isn't a significant cause of LW people often having non-standard social skills? If it's just the second then you have to account for the fact that LW-like thinking is consistent with the natural thinking patterns of high IQ autistics, and so LW will naturally tend to attract them. If you are making the first claim, you have to account for the fact that children are frequently diagnosed with autism before they turn three.

I'm pretty sure that the effect you are describing exists, but it's not Autism OR early isolation, it's AND. Plenty of gifted people are well adjusted. And what starts out as a moderate interpersonal communication deficiency may spiral downward into isolation because of the positive feedback loop you describe. Just like mathematically gifted people spend comparatively more time doing math, physically gifted people spend more time exercising and musically gifted people playing music, there is a mirror vicious circle corresponding to each virtuous circle.

Re Asperger's reclassification: it is called SCD (Social Communication Disorder) in DSM-V, see e.g. https://www.autismspeaks.org/dsm-5/faq and http://www.asha.org/Practice-Portal/Clinical-Topics/Social-Communication-Disorders-in-School-Age-Children/

Alternative hypothesis: schizoid personality.

I find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizoid_personality_disorder#Guntrip_criteria matches me well, but what is ever more important that it sounds like a description of "nerd culture":

• Introversion - check
• Withdrawnness - check
• Narcissism - um, here it is important to point out that low self-confidence, social awkwardness can also be a form of it ("everybody is looking at me and I am ugly!"). Or: the classic "naked at school" nightmares. But this is debatable.
• Self-sufficiency - check
• Sense of superiority - heh heh heh
• Loss of affect - understood as cynicism mainly
• Depersonalization - ?
• Regression - inward, as in: fantasy, D&D etc.
• Regression - backward, as in: enjoying childhood things like simple console games

I don't know how well it describes the LW community, it does describe me, and it generally does a good job of describing the Reddit type nerd-neckbeard community who are IMHO at the very least could be seen as the less intelligent "cousin" of the LW community in general (well, closer to to LW than a fantasy football community is close to LW)

This is just a hypothesis but may worth considering. Are you often described as emotionally cold and withdrawn?

What's the base rate on lackluster social skills? Based on the popularity of self-help books and seminars aimed at improving social skills, I'm led to believe that social butterflies aren't all that common among the general population either.

Most people pick up a huge amount of tacit social knowledge as children and adolescents, through very frequent interaction with many peers. This is often not true of intellectually gifted people, who usually grew up in relative isolation on account of lack of peers who shared their interest.

Curious use of the singular "interest". Somehow I don't think intelligence is the real issue here. Rather, it strikes me as a consequence of diverging interests. Let's take youth/high school sports teams. There are the so-called dumb jocks and then there are athletic geniuses (for example, Alan Turing was an extremely good runner). You could easily end up with a skilled team featuring a large gap in IQ scores. The endpoints of this gap would have overlapping interests despite the intelligence difference. It's the people who focus their attention on a narrow range of topics outside the mainstream who are likely to have the most trouble.

One aspect of the isolation is the construction of concepts, structures thereof and whole private languages that are tuned and specialized to the mind and interests highly gifted. Now private languages don't really exist but that doesn't mean that they don't hinder interaction with other people - esp. the exchange of ideas interesting to them.

Asperger's Syndrome (which is no longer considered a valid construct...)

I'm curious what replaced it, if anything. It certainly seems to describe a real cluster in personspace. Was it just promoted to an unfortunate but non-disordered personality trait?

The tragedy is that none of the super high IQ societies created thus far have been able to meet those needs, and the reason for this is simple. None of these groups is willing to acknowledge or come to terms with the fact that much of their membership belong to the psychological walking wounded.

I came across this same essay some years ago, though I think it was on a different site. The phrase "Psychological walking wounded" has stuck with me ever since. It's just too poignantly accurate a description of my sociomental life to forget.

(it is interesting that this post shows up at a time when I'm trying to arrange psychological appointments to work on this and related issues...)