Some more nuanced advice would have been nice, so I'll toss this out there: my current effort is to avoid over-qualifying what I say. Because I care about precision & nuance (and being 'actually right'), I can end up taking 90 seconds to say something that a 'normal person' can say in 15. "I thought it was a pretty good movie" turns into, "Though the cinematography seemed like it was trying too hard to be cinematography (though it resulted in some moments of beautiful film,), I thought the actors did great. Obviously not his best acting, but pretty good, really, considering that..."

Conversational negotiation demands shorter transactions: if the other person wants to know more they'll ask, "Oh, what did you like about it?"

It's hard stuff :)

I've found that it's the most accomplished people I know who are usually humble (about their achievements and otherwise), and they usually also happen to be very smart.

There are a lot of smart people who are doing nothing with their intelligence, content to just feel superior to others by way of their raw ability to intellectualize. Absent of any meaningful manifestation, intelligence is an unimportant distinction between people, in my opinion.

And yet it is so easy to be a dick. I remember working at one company where my boss was awesome at telling me when I had inadvertently made myself less popular. The classic example was when someone in a meeting said "Wow, [some technology] sounds amazing - how does it work?" and I started my reply with "Well... it's quite complicated, but..."

Now, when someone tells you that the above is irritating and condescending, it's obvious - but before then I had never considered it. So socially awkward isn't necessarily about lacking confidence :)

Take the suggestion in this thread of asking people "What is it you like about American Idol?" - a question which is all too easy to appear dismissive of their mainstream taste (especially when you're obviously the only person in the room not able to discuss last night's installment) even if you regularly enjoy providing detailed answers for similar questions posed by the same people on your love for Lisp, string theory or Star Trek.

If you've got no other framework to decide what to say or how to behave, measuring up your options by asking yourself "Will this make me look like a dick?" will set you on the right path almost 100% of the time.

EDIT: I must mention that spending time with these people can be emotionally taxing. All I feel is uncontrollable rage when I see these people online or at social events. I've spent far too much time and energy thinking about them ...

Where it's most jarring is with religion. I don't object if people believe or don't believe in a God, but I do find it bizarre how many people out there will automatically write someone off as a moron just because that person has any religious beliefs. Sure, there are a lot of moronic religious beliefs and idiotic religious people, but not everyone who has religious beliefs is an intolerant idiot.

Earlier on, when more people had religious beliefs, most intolerant people of course were religious. Now, not so much.

A fair number of people think that a belief in God makes them a better person. That may be, but there are a lot of great people who don't believe in any higher power or afterlife, and I don't see a correlation either way. My suspicion is that most good people who believe in God would still be good people if they didn't believe in God or an afterlife. There are others (on the atheistic side) who argue that belief in God is unreasonable and a sign of a feeble mind, but there's no evidence for that either. I do think certain strains of belief (i.e. fundamentalism) appeal to the worst of humanity, but these don't account for most religious believers.

I think one of the major issues is that the common religious labels (Christian, atheist, Buddhist) are so broad as to be effectively meaningless. You can be a smart, liberal, universalist Christian, a spiritual atheist who believes in life after death, an observant Jew who believes in reincarnation, or an intolerant, conservative Buddhist. (For each of those descriptions, I can name at least a few meeting them.) So any claim made about "atheists" or "Christians" or "Muslims" as a group is going to be nearly meaningless. I definitely think there is a lot in religion that has immense transformative power (for good and bad) but the mere matter of whether a person has religious beliefs or not or belongs to a religious organization seems to say very little about that person.

The only thing that I can say is: You're a moron and your question is idiotic. cackle