> As an outsider looking in I'm starting to wonder if this world is just a bunch of academically capable but socially stunted individuals being preyed on by socially voracious people like Epstein with no morals?

The present-day tech world seems like a pretty extreme version of this phenomenon. Many of our sociopaths (e.g., Musk, Zuckerberg) got a boost from actual technical abilities along the way, which I suppose is similar to Epstein—he seems to have been pretty talented at finance.

(Edit: Musk and Zuckerberg are not socially talented in the usual sense, but have still been extremely successful at getting other people to do what they want.)