Thanks for this post. It's a relief to think that he is probably just being his normal self. Sometimes I feel bad for him, because he is in a family of teacher/counselor lovey types. I wonder if that's unpleasant for him. I know it would be unpleasant for me to be in a family of mostly NT's.
I loved the story about your parents and the prom. Funny!
Yeah, it probably makes for a bit of a disconnect. I note you've indicated your type as INFJ. That means, to a degree, you kind of think like him: you can just observe a situation and immediately grasp its meaning. The difference is that you see the Fe-meaning, which is good at evaluating people dynamics and other areas where strict logical analysis would fail. Assuming he's INTJ, he's going to be just as good at gleaning meaning, but he applies Te, which (as you note of him) is terrible at dealing with people dynamics, but great at chess and strategy. As long as something can be logically picked apart and studied, he'll be great at understanding it.
Where you can help him on the people stuff is to give him basic rules so that even if he's a social klutz, he generally knows what the right thing to do is. Young INTJs don't read people well, which is why we're very skeptical and suspect lying, because they don't see the context the way an INFJ would. An INFJ would note, "Oh, she's in a bad mood about something," and intuitively know how to avoid triggering any unpleasantness, but the INTJ will often accidentally say the wrong thing, with no ill intent, and catch a lot of crap for it. Make it clear that it's kind of like chess, except the pieces tend to think for themselves and often won't do what you want them to, and he has to work around that.
As for making him feel more comfortable around you, don't pity him. INTJs may be bad around people, but we know the difference between love and pity. So often, people think they're being nice to an INTJ, but the result is that the INTJ feels it as an insult, a lack of understanding, a lack of caring.
The psychologist who tested him did say that she felt like he just wanted to rush through everything and go with whatever the easiest answer was. So maybe he just blew off the test. I just wish we could help him figure out what his interests are so he wouldn't be so bored all the time. One of his problems is that he is dyslexic, so he hates reading. I think if he loved reading, he really could engage his brain with whatever his interests are.
Well, it would seem self-evident that dyslexia would make him test much worse than his real brain power would indicate. I'm sure you know more about dyslexia than I do, but it would seem imperative to try to overcome the dyslexia as much as possible. Many dyslexics, I've read, manage to get by via people skills, "reading people" instead of reading books. He doesn't have the people skills, so he needs to learn how to read as best he can. With experience, his intuition should be able to determine what a sentence or paragraph "really means" without having to read every word and meticulously piece all the bits of information together.
In my case, I'm not dyslexic, but I can still look at a word or phrase and read something entirely nonsensical. My brain sees the symbols and puts them together randomly, but usually in an "almost-sensible" way. For instance, I recall logging onto a windows server a few years ago, and I note out of the corner of my eye that it uses "Happy Threading". I do a double-take, look more carefully, and instead read, for real "Hyper-Threading".
While his reading skills remain weak, perhaps videos might help out. Anything scientific should work, though you know his interests better than I. The
Connections series is one I recall enjoying immensely, and should be right up his alley, because it's about how new ideas spontaneously appear based on people/scientists making particular "connections" that no one had made before. The connections are seemingly random, and often don't make sense at first, but James Burke makes it all fit together.
Also, even if he's not so good at reading, he should have the mindset for doing math word problems. If you think about it, math word problems are very similar to the strategy things he's so good at. He intuitively converts everything around him into math-like ideas and comes up with an answer. It should be possible to train that to work on more things than computer games and chess.
Anyway, that's the best I can come up with for now. I wish you and your son all the best.