The reference to Einstein batting a thousand in the ideas department is telling. I'm pretty certain that he had just as many bad ideas as the other folks mentioned, but that he was better at abandoning them.
Treating geniuses as black boxes generating hypotheses that need to be tested and discarded as necessary is all very well, but it isn't too much to ask such individuals to treat their own ideas that same way, rather than insisting they must be right against all evidence to the contrary.
