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Viliam_Bur comments on Stupid Questions December 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Is there a causal link between being relatively lonely and isolated during school years and (higher chance of) ending up a more intelligent, less shallow, more successful adult?
Imagine that you have a pre-school child who has socialization problems, finds it difficult to do anything in a group of other kids, to acquire friends, etc., but cognitively the kid's fine. If nothing changes, the kid is looking at being shunned or mocked as weird throughout school. You work hard on overcoming the social issues, maybe you go with the kid to a therapist, you arrange play-dates, you play-act social scenarios with them..
Then your friend comes up to have a heart-to-heart talk with you. Look, your friend says. You were a nerd at school. I was a nerd at school. We each had one or two friends at best and never hung out with popular kids. We were never part of any crowd. Instead we read books under our desks during lessons and read SF novels during the breaks and read science encyclopedias during dinner at home, and started programming at 10, and and and. Now you're working so hard to give your kid a full social life. You barely had any, are you sure now you'd rather you had it otherwise? Let me be frank. You have a smart kid. It's normal for a smart kid to be kind of lonely throughout school, and never hang out with lots of other kids, and read books instead. It builds substance. Having a lousy social life is not the failure scenario. The failure scenario is to have a very full and happy school experience and end up a ditzy adolescent. You should worry about that much much more, and distribute your efforts accordingly.
Is your friend completely asinine, or do they have a point?
Seems to me that very high intelligence can cause problems with socialization: you are different from your peers, so it is more difficult for you to model them, and for them to model you. You see each other as "weird". (Similar problem for very low intelligence.) Intelligence causes loneliness, not the other way round.
But this depends on the environment. If you are highly intelligent person surrounded by enough highly intelligent people, then you do have a company of intellectual peers, and you will not feel alone.
I am not sure about the relation between reading many books and being "less shallow". Do intelligent kids surrounded by intelligent kids also read a lot?
All of this is very true (for me, anyway--typical mind fallacy and all that). High intelligence does seem to cause social isolation in most situations. However, I also agree with this:
High intelligence does not intrinsically have a negative effect on your social skills. Rather, I feel that it's the lack of peers that does that. Lack of peers leads to lack of relatability leads to lack of socialization leads to lack of practice leads to (eventually) poor social skills. Worse yet, eventually that starts feeling like the norm to you; it no longer feels strange to be the only one without any real friends. When you do find a suitable social group, on the other hand, I can testify from experience that the feeling is absolutely exhilarating. That's pretty much the main reason I'm glad I found Less Wrong.
It is not true that people cannot - or do not - interact successfully with people that are less intelligent than they are. Many children get along well with their younger siblings. Many adults love being kindergarten teachers... Or feel highly engaged working in the dementia wing of the rest home. Many people of all intelligence levels love having very dumb pets. These are not people (or beings) that you relate to because of their 'relatability' in the sense that they are like you, but because they are meaningful to you. And interacting with people build social skills appropriate to those people -- which may not be very generalizable when you are practicing interacting with kindergarten students, but is certainly a useful skill when you are interacting with average people.
I personally would think that the problem under discussion is not related to intelligence, but in trying to help an introvert identify the most fulfilling interpersonal bonds without making them more social in a general sense. However, I don't know the kid in question, so I can't say.