Oh I don't know where we even get that stereotype from. Oh wait, I do, because Albert Einstein was an introvert and preferred to be alone. More recent examples: Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak.
Note that introverted and awkward are not the same. An awkward person is likely to come across as introverted, but not all introverts are awkward.
I don't really know anything about the social skills of the people you list, but I don't imagine them as being awkward.
And in my own life, the people I've met who've seemed obviously-really-damn-smart have also seemed to have better social skills than myself.
Nevertheless, I do think there is a stereotype of "smart people are awkward". I just don't think it's true, and I'm a little surprised that PG seems to believe in it. Or maybe he was just acknowledging it?
(I recently learned of Berkson's paradox[1], which I think might go some way towards explaining the stereotype. Intelligence and social skills both help people to get ahead in life, and if someone mostly hangs out with people with roughly the same amount of life success as themselves, intelligence and social skills will appear to be negatively correlated.)
I think there are just as many examples of world-class smart people on the other end of the outgoing/charismatic curve: Von Neumann, Feynman, Bohr, Russell, Hilbert off the top of my head.
Or is it possible that we know about those world-class smart people because they're outgoing/charismatic? ie. perhaps listing off names of smart people we can think of who are/aren't outgoing/charismatic is maybe not the best way of determining any statistical inference whatsoever.
I don't really know anything about the social skills of the people you list, but I don't imagine them as being awkward.
And in my own life, the people I've met who've seemed obviously-really-damn-smart have also seemed to have better social skills than myself.
Nevertheless, I do think there is a stereotype of "smart people are awkward". I just don't think it's true, and I'm a little surprised that PG seems to believe in it. Or maybe he was just acknowledging it?
(I recently learned of Berkson's paradox[1], which I think might go some way towards explaining the stereotype. Intelligence and social skills both help people to get ahead in life, and if someone mostly hangs out with people with roughly the same amount of life success as themselves, intelligence and social skills will appear to be negatively correlated.)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox