More prosaically, and less politically, academia is full of people who are very smart but not necessarily emotionally and socially well-adjusted. If you conjur

More prosaically, and less politically, academia is full of people who are very smart but not necessarily emotionally and socially well-adjusted. If you conjure in your mind a stereotypical non-self-aware computer nerd who sees that the people around him know less about networking than he does and therefore cannot fathom that his understanding might be inferior to theirs in other ways, think of how much more powerful and persistent this misperception can be when you replace networking with behavioral economics, foreign policy, or the works of George Eliot. Many academics take it for granted that they must be emotionally sophisticated because of what they study. It doesn't occur to them that they can write about poetry or social theory for a living and still be operating on an early adolescent level in their relations with other people. It's pretty obvious that you can be an emotional child and brilliant at an adult level with computers, less obvious but just as true with any subject where success is measured by your ability to publish a paper that other people cite or argue about.