My take on genius is that it's akin to insanity, and for some of us, insanity doesn't seem to be so insane (which itself is an insane thing to say). Nikola Tesla ended his life alone, with a box of scrap parts as collateral for his rent ( https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-may-not-know-about... ). Friedrich Nietzsche wrote "The Parable of the Madman" ( http://historyguide.org/europe/madman.html ), and apocryph…
I am convinced that this idea of people who are just too smart for society is way overblown and quite damaging. I see it so often in tech — the “10x” engineer who is just too smart for social norms like polite communication or hygiene. They are not held to them same social standards as others because they are “just different.” In reality, these folks just use the fact that no one else knows how their code works as an…
The problem isn't that savant's are above these things, but that they matter very little to them. They aren't helpless geniuses who don't know the path to learning social skills, but understand that the reward of those skills just isn't high enough for them personally as it is to most people.
Its hard to relate to that because most human beings are wired to feel good in social situations, but there are those who feel good only when they obsess over the things that they're interested in (and find deep satisfaction from). Put differently, the reward centers that guide most people don't guide them as much. They understand what they're "giving up", but while for others that might be something of great value, it means very little to them.