I was generally the smartest person in the room during school, but also lacked perspective and context back then.

This is not that untypical in this community. LW Censi put the average IQ on LW at something like 140.

There are plenty of people inside Mensa that spend their youth being smarter than the people in the room in school and that go on to develop crackpot theories.

From the perspective of Ilya Shpitser, who was supervised for his Phd by Judea Pearl (who's famous of producing a theory of causality that's very useful for practical purposes), corresponding with David Deutsch in an informal way doesn't give you a lot of credentials.