I was an atypical child with very noticeable unusual traits, yes, but as I've grown older I've "normal-ed out". If someone really gets to know me they might still be puzzled why there are certain normal-person things I cannot do and certain things I can do that most people can't, but for the most part I'm fairly close to baseline, with most of the deviation due to the hyper-WEIRD culture practically everyone on Lesswrong shares rather than unusual mental architecture. To the extent that my actual cognition is unusual, I consider most of the deviations from typicality to be a net negative.

I think the alienation and self-labelng of oneself as extremely atypical is paradoxically due to typical mind fallacy - when a person at first fails to accurately model other people and assumes others are like oneself, and then tries to figure out under what conditions would I behave like those people and do what they did, they very quickly start looking like fundamentally different aliens.

For example, people who are smart sometimes feel alienated from society because others around them are not able to respond appropriately to the nuanced conversational cues they are emitting. Others are unable to accurately express their feelings and thoughts and are generally more clumsy and fuzzy about everything. Others make bad decisions which they would not make if they understood what they did. The smart person attributes these differences to differences in intention and core mental architecture, rather than skill.

For example, picture a teacher of average cognitive ability worn down after a long day. He doesn't have sufficient mental control to keep his emotions in check. He also lacks the meta-cognitive ability to notice he is stressed. The gifted child asks a question he doesn't know the answer to, but the teacher lacks the meta-cognitive ability to realize that he doesn't know the answer and before he can stop it his brain just made something up. The child says "No, that doesn't make sense", and the teacher fails at social cues and takes it literally as "I didn't fully process what you just said" rather than a euphemism for "your explanation is not satisfying to me" and so they repeat themselves. Truth be told the teacher doesn't really know what it means for something to make sense, the way the gifted child does. The child sighs in frustration. The teacher feels resentful about that, but doesn't notice they feel resentful. Later on, when the child speaks out of turn the teacher snaps and gives them detention for interrupting. The teacher truly believes the detention was for interrupting.

The gifted child thinks to herself: "Even though I meant her no harm or disrespect, she has decided to find a small excuse to punish me after I questioned her knowledge. That teacher is punishing me because she thinks that children are not people, they do not have rights. She has status and she is willing to use it. Other human beings are conformist, they dislike those who question authority."

The ordinary child in the same situation would have thought, "Ugh, I didn't do anything really, what's her problem" and not analyzed the situation further. It's the same thought, but only the gifted child takes it to the logical conclusion that the teacher must be fundamentally alien to do such a thing. She'll project her mind upon the teacher, take the teacher's behavior, and then grossly miscalculate his intentions.

These would all be valid interpretations of the teacher's behavior if the teacher had the self-awareness of the child, but as it stands they are not actually true. The teacher and the child are identical in their basic cognitive infrastructure and share motivation and intention, it's just that the child just more self aware.

If the gifted child does not figure out how to accurately model the teacher, this will very quickly develop into "every single person except me and maybe that one other dude is absolutely batshit insane, and I am alone." Every knee jerk political reaction, every instance of blatant injustice, every bad decision, and every rationalization will feed this misconception further, when really differences in meta-cognitive ability are entirely to blame. They subsequently grow up to become contrarians and the word "typical" becomes vaguely insulting to them.

I listed intelligence because that's why I think lesswrongers think they are atypical at a far higher rate than could possibly be true, but another example: most college students might say that most people pressure others drink while simultaneously saying that they,themselves, would not pressure anyone to drink. They're looking at their own mental state, the behaviors of others, seeing a disparity, and concluding that others are mentally different. Like the gifted child, they are simply failing to model other people's failure to act the way that they would like to act, unable to realize that behavior isn't a direct reflection of internal state.