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Nick_Tarleton comments on Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great - Less Wrong
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Yet many highly intelligent people with normal rationality have terrible fashion sense, particularly males, at least in my anecdotal experience. Ditto for social skills, dating skills, etc... (fashion is really a subset of social skills, combined with aesthetics). (a) Are these people not really rationalists, because they haven't figured out how to improve themselves in those areas, or (b) do ordinary rationalists have trouble figuring out that they would benefit from improvement in those areas, and how to do it? Or perhaps (c), they recognize the benefits of greater social abilities, but they do not believe that the effort is worth it?
In principle, normal intelligent rationalists could figure out how to improve their fashion skills and social skills deliberately and systematically. But if indeed so few people in that category do so, I would take it as evidence that a systematic approach to developing interpersonal skills and style actually requires a higher level of rationality that what normal rationalists possess (perhaps x-rationality, depending on what we mean by that).
Three other suggestions:
(d) they've let "bad at fashion", "bad social skills", and the like become part of their identities, rationalized by the belief that those things are shallow, non-intellectual, whatever;
(e) they didn't practice those skills at a young enough age (because they were too young to realize the importance, they were socially excluded, ...) to deeply learn them, also reinforcing both (d) and a (destructive, hard to break) sense of being low-status;
(f) high intelligence + interest/aptitude in rationality correlates with mild autism-spectrum traits (not necessarily sufficient to be diagnosed, but enough to cause social problems, particularly in childhood).
I think all of those are highly plausible factors (all of which applied to me, btw).
Additionally, they may have internalized the stereotype that rational people should act like Spock. And conversely, they may associate those skills with people they dislike: "those are the shallow kinds of things the popular people do, whereas I am deep."
I like the interactionist perspective between nature and nurture you are taking here. It's not necessarily destiny that these people grow up with social deficits, it's just a common outcome of the interaction of their individual characteristics with a negative formative social environment.
This is a can of worms that I was thinking about opening up. Our normal intelligent rationalists would also tend to be high on "systemizing" rather than "empathizing" in Simon Baron-Cohen's theory, and more interested in "things" on the "people vs things" dimension.
The result is that the kind of neurotypical cognition required for social skills and fashion sense may seem non-intuitive or even alien to the category of people we are talking about. For instance, fashion and social skills often involve doing things simply because other people are doing them, which may defy one's sense of individualism, and belief that behaviors should have objective purpose.
Furthermore, this type of individual may feel that people should be accorded status based on "objective merit," which means being good at the things that matter to our intelligent rationalists. They may find it nauseating that status often depends on things like clothing, body language and voice tonality, who you hang out with, etc... rather than on actual intelligence or competence.
90% of social communication will seem meaningless to them, because it is based on emoting, status ploys, or pointing out things that are obvious, in contrast to the type of communication that is "really" meaningful, such as exchanging of ideas, factual information, or practical processes.
For this type of intelligent rationalist to build social skills from the ground up is an impressive feat, because they have to get over their own biases and past a bunch of developmental barriers (whether biological or social). A higher level of rationality may be a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for accomplishing this feat. (Yet of course, a higher level of rationality may be linked to even more social deficits, semi-autistic "thing-oriented" personality traits, etc... Perhaps this is why the world is not ruled by an over-caste of charismatic, fashionable people with 150+ IQ.)