I more or less agree with your reading of this essay, but it misses an important point that the edited version on Edge leaves out -- in the original version, he compared the friends of Aaron Swartz with the friends of someone Michael knows.
Basically, when she was institutionalized against her will, her low-status, relatively poor friends helped break her out of the mental hospital and hide her until the police chase blew over. In contrast, when placed in a legal battle Aaron Swartz wasn't able to rely on his much smarter, wealthier, and in almost every way better off friends to help him. The well-learned elites couldn't really help protect him because they were too used to submitting.
With this in mind, the point of the essay is much more that we rely on non-social cognition for innovation, but that the culture of submission has destroyed our mechanisms for supporting self-actualizing innovators who come under fire. With this lack of support, our innovators are even worse off than they are just based on worse social skills and being less well understood.
Can you link to the unedited essay? Or is it not available?
Michael Vassar has written a provocative response to this year's Edge question: "What *should* we be worried about?". But, I'm confused about his post. My attempt to summarize his point of view follows:
1. People have physiological needs (food, shelter, safety etc.) and social needs (esteem, love, respect etc.).
2. People have mental programs to try to achieve both needs.
3. Modern society has been exceptional at fulfilling people's physiological needs but not very good at fulfilling their social needs.
4. Thus, mental programs that were meant to achieve physiological needs do not develop very well relative to mental programs meant to achieve social needs .
5. Mental programs for achieving physiological needs are more precise and hence harder to hack. Mental programs for social needs are fuzzy and vague and thus more easily hackable.
6. Thus, and because of (4), people are more hackable.
7. This manifests operationally as a few powerful people (the rich, the politicians etc.) hacking the majority into submitting to their will.
8. But even the powerful do not have significantly better mechanisms for precise thought. It is just that their social weirdness (need for power, lack of empathy etc.) allowed them to be the hacker instead of the hacked.
9. Thus for most of our useful innovations, we are forced to rely on the rare people who are capable of precise abstract thought because they worry less about their social needs.
So, I guess Vassar's point is that this pattern is what we should worry about as it systematically suppresses useful innovators.
Would agree about my reading of his short essay?
How solid do you think his argument is?