While I read and enjoyed your essay, unlike others of yours I've read, I disagree very strongly about a certain point: that is your belief that a genius- however you'd care to classify and identify such an animal- has the same likelihood of being emotionally well-adjusted as an individual of normal intelligence. I do not have the weight of psychology or statistics behind me but as I work in the sciences, I've had constant contact with Mensa candidates. And in my experience, the smarter an individual is, the less connected to planet earth they are.
I've not meet one or two or three; my prior position was with a prominent research company. Doctorates were running around everywhere. They infested the place like cockroaches, and it got to the point that as they crossed from one section from another, word would go out that xxx was on the move and would most likely attempt to either kill himself and/or others in a certain way. Us lowly operators and techs had a fair idea of which individual was likely to do what and what we needed to do to stop them from doing it. My absolute favourite was the time where two of them tried to put out a fire- using compressed air. They were lucky. They were standing far away enough so that they only lost their eyebrows.
In my current position, I've only got two to deal with. Between them they're controlling the product output to the tune of millions of tonnes a year. And because everyone else finds them so impossible to communicate with, I'm the one who gets to be the translator. Lucky me! It's getting better as I gain experience, but there are still days where I want to bash my head up against the wall.
To reiterate: I have no statistics or studies to back me up, but my overwhelming experience with genuine geniuses is that they're insane and very rarely connected to reality. I've met one- one- individual that I'd trust to cross the road without getting themselves killed. It might be that the sciences encourages a particular type of thinking, but regardless, much of Sherlock's behaviour is well known to me.
I've dealt with athletes like this and known friends in the music business who deal with musicians who behaved similarly so I wouldn't necessarily say it was their overwhelming intellect that was to blame.
I do think that there's something detrimental about specialization, when all of one's talent or intellect becomes focused in a single direction you lose perspective.
Having spent almost a decade in academia I would agree that there is a high percentage of people with less than stellar social skills, but I actually think that it is the other way around. I think that having bad social skills, a single-mindedness, or lacking a number of other social/real world skills makes you more likely to be able to go through a PhD and higher up the academic hierarchy. In other words, I think geniuses that has normal social skills are less likely to end up being successful in or choosing that type of career.
I also spent my research project surrounded by some very brilliant scientists. I agree that there are some who do have less than stellar social skills but the vast majority are perfectly normal.
Also I do not think that many of the people working my lab at least were any more intelligent than the general population. They were just good at what they did. I wanted to point out in the meta above that the people we think of as "geniuses" may be no more intelligent than us mere mortals. They have just found a niche and become very good at their chosen subject.
I do not think that scientists who do end up with poor social skills did so because of their intelligence. It is much more to do with their environment, whether they were accepted or not by their peers, how supportive their family were. Also work environment is also important. Some labs foster great social bonds, others do not. In some labs you almost have to behave ridiculously arrogantly and unsociably just to get to the electron microscope.
Intelligence and poor social skills are not correlated and even if they were - correlation does not equate to causation.
I've not meet one or two or three; my prior position was with a prominent research company. Doctorates were running around everywhere. They infested the place like cockroaches, and it got to the point that as they crossed from one section from another, word would go out that xxx was on the move and would most likely attempt to either kill himself and/or others in a certain way. Us lowly operators and techs had a fair idea of which individual was likely to do what and what we needed to do to stop them from doing it. My absolute favourite was the time where two of them tried to put out a fire- using compressed air. They were lucky. They were standing far away enough so that they only lost their eyebrows.
In my current position, I've only got two to deal with. Between them they're controlling the product output to the tune of millions of tonnes a year. And because everyone else finds them so impossible to communicate with, I'm the one who gets to be the translator. Lucky me! It's getting better as I gain experience, but there are still days where I want to bash my head up against the wall.
To reiterate: I have no statistics or studies to back me up, but my overwhelming experience with genuine geniuses is that they're insane and very rarely connected to reality. I've met one- one- individual that I'd trust to cross the road without getting themselves killed. It might be that the sciences encourages a particular type of thinking, but regardless, much of Sherlock's behaviour is well known to me.
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I do think that there's something detrimental about specialization, when all of one's talent or intellect becomes focused in a single direction you lose perspective.
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Also I do not think that many of the people working my lab at least were any more intelligent than the general population. They were just good at what they did. I wanted to point out in the meta above that the people we think of as "geniuses" may be no more intelligent than us mere mortals. They have just found a niche and become very good at their chosen subject.
I do not think that scientists who do end up with poor social skills did so because of their intelligence. It is much more to do with their environment, whether they were accepted or not by their peers, how supportive their family were. Also work environment is also important. Some labs foster great social bonds, others do not. In some labs you almost have to behave ridiculously arrogantly and unsociably just to get to the electron microscope.
Intelligence and poor social skills are not correlated and even if they were - correlation does not equate to causation.
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