> Why are their reasons for believing that they are special invalid, while yours are valid?

A lesson I've learned, the hard way, many times, is that it's possible to appear intelligent when you aren't. For example, people often mistake excellent communication skills as intelligence, so people who speak and present well are lauded for their smarts. It's like Williams syndrome, which people find endlessly curious, because they have exceptional language skills, but are otherwise cognitively impaired.

And it's not often immediately obvious if somebody just uses language well, or if they're genuinely intelligent. It can take weeks or months of observation, and probing to start to see their cognitive deficits. They might even be reasonably bright, but we're not talking about that kind of above average person.

There are other similar phenomenon. The idiot-savant, who can't brush their teeth in the morning by themselves, but can then go and crack crypto over their breakfast of apple and carrot paste.

Or the otherwise completely average person who puts 80 hours a week into violin practice and can perform with the best gifted soloist. Hard work can get you very far.

Argh it's tough to explain because English hasn't really developed a reasonable vocabulary that allows for simple categorical descriptions of different kinds of intelligence.

Imagine you go to a track and field camp, and it's made up of all the fastest runners from their respective towns. Except you and maybe one other kid are twice as fast as everybody else there. Even in that environment, where everybody else is fast, you're faster. Nobody there is slow, it's just that you and the other kid are in a class of your own. You didn't practice to become fast, you simply are. There are kids there who've dedicated their lives to being fastest, and some of them are quite talented. But it doesn't matter. They get upset at you for being fastest there with little effort. And on top of it, you can even play other events a runner wouldn't be good at pretty high levels. Your particular gift isn't in shot put, and you don't play that event, but you're enough of a natural athlete that you can figure out a way to place in the top 3 anyways.

And to make it worse, instead of competing you in the all state sports camp final, they turn you into a team coach. But you don't really know anything about the process and particulars of what it take for a normal person to become a fast runner. You were simply built that way and nobody knows what to do with you.

You've never been anything but kind and friendly to you, but they definitely feel a little threatened and jealous. So you end up eating meals alone, or maybe with the other fast kid, who it turns out you don't really get along with for normal social reasons like not having other shared interests. Eventually a few kids respond to your friendliness and you hang around for a bit, but their other friends can't accept you so given the decision to be your friend or go back to their old group of friends, they fade away. You can't begrudge them that, you understand, but it's the 10 thousandth time that happened to you. That's your life.

I've been fortunate enough on occasion to end up on groups with other similarly gifted people and it's awesome. But like I said earlier, you don't ever really become friends, you mutually acknowledge each other's intellect and get about doing the task at hand. Eventually somebody is happy with the work your team is doing and thinks it'd be great to break the team up and spread the smarts around a bit, so it never lasts long.