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Nornagest comments on How my social skills went from horrible to mediocre - Less Wrong
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I'm baffled. People say that nerds have bad social skills, but nerds create nerd communities and don't show any social ineptness. Anime fans create fan clubs, sci-fi and fantasy geeks create sci-fi and fantasy societies, even math nerds get together to solve some math. Granted, there are people who are really bad at social skills, or extremely shy, or have social anxiety, but even among nerd communities they are minority. However, it might be selection bias, real nerds indeed stay at home and don't even go to nerd communities.
I think there are different social skills for different communities, I guess. 2 nerds can talk for hours about Warhammer without any need for conversation starters or tricks to keep conversants interested. But 1 male nerd will not have any idea what to talk about with 1 non-nerd woman.
Even social anxiety is context-dependent. In some contexts I feel extremely uncomfortable and can't even start talking with anybody, in other contexts I'm the most outgoing.
I guess there are communication habits and skills that become part of System 1 in different communities, when the same people are talking to each other in the same community for months. Then once you end up in another community with different internalized habits and social rituals, there's massive dissonance and miscommunication. People clusterize into subcultures with different rituals, quirks, behaviors, memes, get used to each other inside subcultures, but at the expense of being able to understand people from different subcultures.
You can participate in, or even help form, communities and still be socially inept. The stereotype should, of course, be taken with a grain of salt when it comes to individual cases, but it's not pointing to an absolute lack of social interaction so much as a limited social range: your stereotypical nerd has hobbies and friends and can probably talk your ear off about them, but he's lost when it comes to social tasks outside the narrow scope of his community.
Your example about flirting seems to be gesturing in this direction, but I think you're assuming a tradeoff where none exists; socially adept people are just as good at shop or hobby talk as the average nerd, but they also have the skills necessary to bridge communication gaps when they don't have a huge body of shared enthusiasm to fall back on.