ETA: I've updated my position since writing this comment and no longer endorse it; see this comment.
I agree with Lumifer and shminux's comments. More generally, this does not seem like the sort of thing that you should be making conclusions about without taking a look at actual data when actual data is easily available. I recommend Neihart (1999). At best, the picture is a lot more nuanced than you're making it out to be, and at worst, you're regurgitating a cached thought: "Gifted children are poorly adjusted compared to their peers." The closest thing to this in the literature is the correlation between highly creative adults and psychopathology, particularly mood disorders, psychosis, and suicidality; not more general giftedness and social competence. There isn't enough evidence to conclude that this generalizes, in terms of populations, to highly intelligent individuals of all ages or to highly creative, or more generally, highly intelligent, children; or that this generalizes, in terms of individual characteristics, to social competence.
As for giftedness and measurements of psychological adjustment besides social competence, most studies have found little correlation between depression, anxiety, or suicidality and giftedness, and what correlation there is errs on the side of gifted children being better-adjusted than their average peers. Gifted children are also far less likely to engage in deviant behavior.
As for social competence, it's diverse among gifted persons. We can't conclude that either intelligence or personality factors are the primary causal factor in any purported correlation between the two and social competence. That is, your model is "Gifted children are highly intelligent. Gifted children are dissimilar from their peers because they are highly intelligent. Their peers ostracize them because they are dissimilar. Ostracized children engage in less social interaction. Gifted children have poor social skills because they have less experience with social interaction." A similarly plausible model is: "Some gifted children feel dissimilar from their peers. Gifted children who feel dissimilar from their peers are less likely to interact with their peers. Gifted children who interact less have poor social skills." And it can be both, and/or something else. There's also some evidence that verbally precocious children are less socially competent, or at least perceive themselves so, than mathematically precocious children. Finally, a big confounder in this entire field of inquiry is the correlation between high socioeconomic class and giftedness; it's hard to get a large control group that isn't also more socioeconomically heterogeneous than the experimental group.
If we're going to armchair psychologize, then I much prefer Paul Graham's model. High-IQ societies suffer from the same deficiency as public schools and prisons: their selection criteria are neither the motives of their members nor individual characteristics highly correlated with particular motives, groups composed of individuals with diffuse motives are directionless, and directionless groups that are prevented from decomposing into smaller more purposeful groups degenerate into unadulterated status games.
This community has a tendency to speculate wildly, especially about psychology and sociology. This can be useful. Sometimes there's no data to look at. But when there's data to look at, you should look at it. Jonah, do you disagree that this article has unnecessarily low epistemic standards? Usually when this criticism is made, you point out that you are still explaining and not yet defending, but there are clear misunderstandings of psychopathology, as detailed below by Lumifer, and direct contradictions with empirical evidence, as I have detailed above, so I don't see how that response would be applicable in this context.
If we're going to armchair psychologize, then I much prefer Paul Graham's model.
Honestly, I think that is the worst model. I remember how we, the 3-4 nerds in the class, how bitter we were about the popular kids and how we have gladly sacrificed our intelligence or books or anything to be like them, be boys who are respected by boys and loved by girls. Our lives were characterized of bitter envy of the popular kids, with the occasional desperate sour-graping.
Paul Graham is used to productive nerds, teenagers who at 16 are already writing useful softwar...
I've often heard LWers describe themselves as having autism, or Asperger's Syndrome (which is no longer considered a valid construct, and was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders two years ago.) This is given as an explanation for various forms of social dysfunction. The suggestion is that such people have a genetic disorder.
I've come to think that the issues are seldom genetic in origin. There's a simpler explanation. LWers are often intellectually gifted. This is conducive to early isolation. In The Outsiders Grady Towers writes:
Most people pick up a huge amount of tacit social knowledge as children and adolescents, through very frequent interaction with many peers. This is often not true of intellectually gifted people, who usually grew up in relative isolation on account of lack of peers who shared their interests.
They often have the chance to meet others similar to themselves later on in life. One might think that this would resolve the issue. But in many cases intellectually gifted people simply never learn how beneficial it can be to interact with others. For example, the great mathematician Robert Langlands wrote:
At first blush, this seems very strange: much of Langlands' work involves generalizations of Selberg's trace formula. It seems obvious that it would be fruitful for Langlands to have spoken with Selberg about math more than once, especially given that the one conversation that he had was very fruitful! But if one thinks about what their early life experiences must have been like, as a couple of the most brilliant people in the world, it sort of makes sense: they plausibly had essentially nobody to talk to about their interests for many years, and if you go for many years without having substantive conversations with people, you might never get into the habit.
When intellectually gifted people do interact, one often sees cultural clashes, because such people created their own cultures as a substitute for usual cultural acclimation, and share no common background culture. From the inside, one sees other intellectually gifted people, recognizes that they're very odd by mainstream standards, and thinks "these people are freaks!" But at the same time, the people who one sees as freaks see one in the same light, and one is often blind to how unusual one's own behavior is, only in different ways. Thus, one gets trainwreck scenarios, as when I inadvertently offended dozens of people when I made strong criticisms of MIRI and Eliezer back in 2010, just after I joined the LW community.
Grady Towers concludes the essay by writing: