the gentle arts of making enemies

and calling them something else

I especially note the first one.
"Good conversation is an exchange. The most basic form of social ineptitude is to say what's on your mind, even though you have no reason to believe your listeners are interested. Even more cloddish: Saying what's on your mind, even though you know that your listeners are not interested."
Since it is clear that very, very, very, very few people have a good deal of interest in the random things that I do, I accept that most people don't want to hear what's on my mind. And hence don't share this freely. The trick has been finding enough of a breaking in point to interfere or interrupt in the cloddish banality of others with a moderately interesting factoid and then move away from the conversation once it retires to boring things. I think the problem for me is more finding other people who have interesting things to say more than finding my own words too interesting. Maybe those two things are related.

"...strong preference for expressing your own ideas and little interest in the things other people want to talk about - especially social chitchat and small talk". Right. I can only have so many conversations about "how's your day" before they instead become "what's your day". Few people have much interest in the actual how portion of the question.

I do however find some credence in the "acting like a jerk won't get people to listen to you". I see this problem all the time with various experts on scientific matters (or especially w/ economics). Krugman is a notorious asshole in this regard, getting in constant digs of ad hominem attacks on his political adversaries while explaining how stupid they were. But he also just won a Nobel for economics. So it's not like people didn't listen to him anyway at some point. I'm not sure where I come down on the idea of "being friendly/nice" to other people. But it doesn't really seem like it should be a default position given the nature of "other people".

I suppose this conditional problem would change if I actually needed all that much of regular favors or networking effects. Or I understood how to leverage such things in a useful way.