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What do you think of that model of social interactions? It says it's a model of autism, but I think it works for people in general. Most people are always trying to elevate their status, or at least prevent is from dropping. They may accept the friendship of people one step below them, but almost never two steps. Creating awkward situations when someone one step below them befriends someone who is one more step below them.
Personally, I find I've mostly withdrawn from the game and enjoy my time by myself. I'm comfortable that I'm close enough with coworkers and other acquaintances I have a little bit of an emergency network, but otherwise I enjoy spending most of my time alone.
I think that the kind of ""autism"" that shows up in very-smart-people isn't autism at all, it's (even if "unconscious" or unexamined or explicitly believed to be otherwise or learned-over-time-and-burned-into-instincts) an intentional rejection of some or many 'normal' social games because they're judged to be bad, counterproductive, stupid. This is very different from the kind of "autism" that's a neurodevelopmental disorder.
I'm not really claiming that said autists are better. The actions taken as a result of said "autism" are not uniformly good, or better than alternatives - being able to participate in the 'normal' stuff is both instrumentally useful and useful as a way to pick out the parts of the bad-social-thing that are in fact good. And if everyone's playing a game, even if the game is 'bad' in a broad sense it might still be a local optimum to go along with it, and if the rejection is unconscious or unexamined it might (and often does) lead to outcomes worse than not rejecting the thing in the first place.
But, like, the fact that a lot of very smart people and contrarian / independent thinkers seem to have an issue that makes them have trouble with social interaction is quite odd, because 'social interaction' isn't something removed from causality, it is something one could understand even without all the relevant instincts, and very smart people should be well placed to do it. So it's more likely that they, in some sense, don't want to understand it.
It's not just 'status'. If humans didn't have 'status hierarchies', we'd re-invent something related purely out of, i guess, 'instrumental convergence'. Some people are just more ... some of useful, funnier, better connected, hotter. (there's a correlation between individual but it isn't that large). The reason I don't want to be friends with the people several-levels-below me is, mostly, that I find interacting with them to be relatively less fun, productive, (...) than interacting with my current level. And people several above me make the same judgement. And if there's someone several-levels-below me that I would get something out of interacting with, I (maybe moreso than others, but it's not rare) do it! And you can see this as 'raising that person's status a little' too, I guess.
Again, just instrumentally this is suboptimal IMO. Even if all I want to do is code, I'll be a better coder if I read all the latest blogs, talk with people who do similar things. I'll get opportunities to work with other competent people, either for free or for pay.
There are obviously a bunch of pathologies in social interaction that the above doesn't address, and that cause the supposed autist at the beginning to disconnect, but i've already typed too much. But I don't think it's a reason to reject 'interacting with people' in general. Plus, there are a lot of subcultures that interact in different ways. You could try befriending people more similar to you on the internet, I suppose, it's in some ways comparable to IRL and at any rate better than nothing. Discord and twitter are apparently very good for that.
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