You've all pretty much anticipated a lot of what I was going to say, but I'll hold off commenting too much at the moment. I've tried to give examples from experiences that I thought were general enough that probably most people had had similar ones.

Point 1.
One very specific experience: when I started university, I had a number of friends who were prodigies of sorts. One had started college when he was 14, the other at 15. Both had a similar problem in dealing with their older 'peers', although the 15 yo was much more adept at understanding what his own motivations and fears were. I've lost track of the second boy, but the first is among my closest friends even today, now that I'm 42 and he's closing in on 40. Both were brilliant. The second boy, though, spoke to me once about a class we were in. I don't recall if we were in it together or if I had had it previously. This was some time ago. Anyway, he told me he really needed to ask questions sometimes, but didn't because he was afraid of being humiliated by the older guys. "Oh, you think your *SO* smart, but you didn't even know XYZ! So much for your being a prodigy!"

This is a very common problem for kids who are good at school or have something (other than sports) that they're really good at. Any failure at all, any hint of intellectual weakness results in an immediate barrage of venom-tipped projectiles at the exposed area.

Point 2.
And yet another thing I was going to bring up is feigned ignorance. I'm usually pretty calm with my kids, but one thing that really sends me into a tirade is when they pretend to be more stupid than they are - particularly if they're asking for my help on something. "Look, I'll help you, but it's your damned homework and I'm not gonna do it for you." I don't have to do this very often, as they know where the line is, but like any kid they'll test the limits occasionally.

Helen:
Very, very good examples. I'm not familiar with those examples, but I've read similar anecdotes in Lister and Demarco, among others. It's not maliciousness or stupidity, I think, but lack of training for managers and - for a long time - the lack of their being anything like 'management science.' You take someone who's a brilliant engineer and put him in charge of a bunch of other people and he may or may not take to it. It's a gamble.

Jackie: As I said, I consider wisdom vs intelligence to be a separate discussion, so I'm willing to accept the common view. Also, I don't understand enough about general intelligence OR wisdom to defend my opinions which are founded on my own gestalted epiphanies and not training or well-considered reasoning. Nor have I thought this all the way through. Still, correct or not, I have my opinion. I suspect wisdom is not one thing, but many things. It's an axis - or more probably multiple axes - in the space of intelligence, though these axes are not orthogonal (independent). It's a kind of intelligence that is dependent on other intelligences and on which other intelligences depend. On the contrary view, I could make a similar view of personality. I think personality is affected by intelligence and also affects intelligence - and yet it seems silly to say that personality IS a kind of intelligence. OTOOH, 50 years ago we might not have considered physical ability or interpersonal skills to be "kinds of intelligence."

k