My friends joke that I'm a sociopath or autistic, and my decisions have been called 'crazy' many times, and the only way I overcome social awkwardness is to treat everything as a joke. I have close friends whom I rarely talk to, and I'm not sure whether or not to blame a higher score for that. In a way, it's nice to be able to retain information and to be good at words and numbers, to be able to entertain myself (saves a lot of $$), but man, the first 25 years of my life (I'm 31 now) were such a struggle socially. There's deep-rooted feelings of anger at rejection, and I cling to a higher score as one of my main source of pride. (Yes, I'm jealous of people who have even higher IQs.)

Then again, my mentor who is at least one standard deviation higher seemed to have had few troubles socially.

That's a dumb joke. You might have one of those conditions, and proper diagnosis and understanding of how your mind works can be a gateway to therapy that helps you achieve your life goals with less frustration.

High IQ doesn't make you have low EQ. Some people have both high or both low or one of each.

Real IQ tests (i.e. not ones with portraits of Einstein on them) cover a few more areas than spatial awareness. This makes them a useful diagnostic tool sometimes -- as a personal anecdote, there is a huge difference in my score if you remove the processing speed parts, which apparently is evidence in favour of ADHD.

But even so, they are hugely limited in determining many very important qualities. Like social skills.

It's just another number we can calculate that happens to be relatively fixed by genetics and has some predictive power. But so is your height, and nobody raves about that.

Employers and mating partners rave a lot about height. But height doesn't control the mouth and hands, so it can't make you talk about itself like brain features can.

IQ scores says nothing about your social skills. Nor does it say anything about how well equipped you are at difficult topics such as math. What it more or less does is give some kind of rating on how good you are at correctly figuring stuff out on your own in comparison with other people.

So in short:

1. You don't have to be a math genius but you still can have a high IQ (this is why most standardized/Mensa IQ tests are centered around pattern recognition == "how well you are equipped to correctly figure something out")

2. Many terrible socially awkward people have extremely high IQs, but this doesn't have to be a prerequisite as such.

Do you believe IQ is directly linked to the lack of social skills?

I have always had a problem assuming everyone else gets what I am trying to imply, even with shorter sentences - but over the 26 years of my life I learned that was not true at all.

So essentially my learning of "why do I suck at socialising" had always been linked to learning "what are people not aware of", rather than somehow being "socially incapable".

It's a different part of the brain. Social skills like this are called theory of mind. The spectrum part of autism spectrum includes a trade-off between attention to explicit detail and an awareness of overall bacground context.