One for Sorrow

I wonder if this might be at least partially based on a misunderstanding of asynchronous development. It's fairly typical for highly gifted children to have social problems in school because they're developmentally out of step with their age peers (and often out of step within themselves as well-- when multiple cognitive skills are much more advanced than normal, they're usually not all advanced to the same degree). In real life, this tends to level out when the people are in their twenties. It's just a part of the developmental process. So by the time they're in they're thirties, most RL people who could labeled as "geniuses" do pretty well in terms of emotional and social skills unless there are other factors complicating the process (like anxiety disorders or Asperger's, which the series of tubes we inhabit seriously needs to learn is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for being highly intelligent). Maybe some people get so familiar with examples of supersmart kids who find it difficult to socialize with their age peers and infer a false causative relationship between excelling at the more academic or technical skills and failing at social and emotional skills. And they just don't realize that it's not that the kids are permanently deficient in those areas, it's just that they're developing at a different pace from most kids their age and most of them will grow up to do just fine in social situations.