"And I believe the conversation here starts with accepting a simple truth, which is that Weird Nerds will have certain traits that might be less than ideal, tha

"And I believe the conversation here starts with accepting a simple truth, which is that Weird Nerds will have certain traits that might be less than ideal, that these traits come “in a package” with other, very good traits" I think the point here can be strengthened by removing the issue of "weird traits" entirely. The simple reality is, if you are hiring someone to be very, very smart in their field, at a world-class, there is literally no one who can just parachute in and replace them, level, you need to minimize the amount of other things they have to do in order to operate at that level. Why hire a world-class irreplaceable expert to do anything if you're going to require them to spend 90% of their time doing things other than being a world-class irreplaceable expert? Even if the expert is the nicest person in the history of humanity, it's still a complete waste if you can't support them and they have to do all this other stuff just to be allowed to function as a world-class expert. In local parlance, this is no different than hiring a senior engineer and then 100% filling their schedule with meetings. Or expecting to hire a unicorn that is an expert in seven distinct languages and is also a manager and a high-level sales person. If I put that job listing out HR would laugh and send it back to me. Essentially making "world class scientist AND good manager AND expert sales/politician" the baseline for functionality in the sciences is just a recipe for futility. There doesn't even have to be a correlation with "weird traits"; even a population-average distribution of the ability to me a manager + politician + sales + something else is a very, very tall ask. Add back in that there are certainly good reasons that outlier personality traits are fairly likely to go with outlier skills and it just makes it worse, but it would be plenty bad enough without that.