It does apply to praise: I take statements of the type "you're so wonderful" as having much more to do with how the person feels than it has to do with me.

Women, in particular, are quite adept at this.

Citation?

(e) I say something that someone doesn't understand. I think "maybe the person needs more context," and follow up by giving more context. The person still doesn't understand, so I think "ok, I guess I have to give even more context" and so continue in the same direction. In fact, the amount of context that I would need to give for my point to be clear would take ~100 hours to convey, so that what I'm doing is actually not at all productive. The person perceives the situation as

Jonah is totally ignoring the fact that I'm not understanding what I'm saying, and keeps going on and on about the same thing, oblivious to my feelings

because he or she has no way of knowing that I'm explicitly trying to address the fact that the person is uncomfortable about not understanding.

Oh. Well. Oops.

But what alternatives are there? Should I just give up? That seems rude too.

There is also something else going on here, which I realized after learning about personality types, especially Jung's theories and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. One dimension separates along the primary mode of seeing the world (Sensing vs iNtuitive), with the former ones collecting individual facts and strictly following isolated rules, and the latter ones always looking for the generalized principle behind the facts and questioning the origin and sense of rules.

These two types have a lot of trouble understanding each others' way of thinking and frequently get into each others' hairs; e.g. S types tend to interpret N types questioning rules out of curiosity as a personal attack on their way of life (especially so if accurate), while N types tend to dismiss criticism by S types as small-minded bean counting and accuse them of missing the forest for the trees.

Now, there are roughly four to six times as many S types as N types around, and on top of that most weak cases of N types tend to hide it so as not to seem too weird. On the other hand, abstract topics (natural sciences, Less Wrong) tend to attract N types. From this baseline (and your description) I infer that you are also one of the aliens. You can't fundamentally alter your way of thinking to fit in (would you even want to?) - the best you can hope for is to find and befriend the other hidden aliens while trying to get along with the rest.

There's also a nice TED talk on the matter. Just google "Weirdos, Misfits and You". And you might like Eugene Ionesco's "Rhinoceros". It's usually taken as a metaphor for something else, but I still find that it hits the mark pretty well. It's also short and fun to read, so there's no good excuse not to.

Sorry no source, but from what I've read, people with engineering degrees are recruited because they're recruitable as suicide bombers, they're not wanted for bombmakers or because they'd be good at positioning themselves for maximum damage.