I've thought before about why so many intellectual leaders and visionaries are so intensely weird. I suspect that there's a general personality factor of "group conformity", and it's important to have a low level of this factor in addition to high technical understanding to reach new insights and push in unusual directions. Without that, you don't get bizarre behavior and opinions, but you also don't get work that requires pushing against the consensus for years.
I don't think everyone should have low conformity, or that it would be good for society if everyone did, but we need some amount of those people to keep from falling into local attractors.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
