Comment by robocat

> [people without soft skills] were always the extreme intelligence outliers

This is a B-player myth.

High intelligence makes you better at soft skills. People are complex, and being good at soft skills takes intelligence, intelligence to intuit the importance and see the patterns of soft skills.

It is true that if you have high skills that a business needs, you can choose to ignore many internal norms of dress or etiquette.

And also as your status goes up, the more you don't need to care about signaling, and some people do counter-signalling. I always think of this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/lifestyle/article-9233455/Prince...

Unfortunately it is also true that some people think that acting badly will give them cred (reversing the causality that having cred permits bad behaviour). Was Sam-Bankman-Fried acting that cryptic appearance? Do executives also model their behaviour by rewatching The Apprentice or Gordon Ramsay?

Disclaimer: That's mostly my personal opinion, from watching people smarter than I. Then again I'm no genius, nor do I win status games, so perhaps I'm just ignorant. I've definitely seen some less talented try and put on an act leading to a pratfall. Also many of the smartest people I know left school at 15.