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indeed it is

this is not a binary situation. you can be a master of one, two, or even more things and still have a broad base.

it's also all relative and honestly just being happy with what you have, both in terms of material things as well as mental skills/knowledge is a good thing. doesn't mean you stop learning or earning but you don't have to be disappointed if you don't get x amount of dollars or a y number of square feet in your house or z number of factoids in your trivia database

The popular idiom is often shortened, making it seem contrary in meaning, but the full phrase is: A Jack of all trades, and master of none, is oftentimes better than a master of one.

calm down, Okabe!

I know that I don't know.

We have a light switch that we had no clue how to operate when we moved into our new house, and it was painful how utterly impossible it was for my mom to figure it out, she tried using it like a normal switch several times and simply gave up..
I then went "well it presumably works somehow, let's just test all the possible ways there are to interact with a button", and it turns out you hold the switch in to dim/brighten the lamp alternately. Took me like 2 minutes to figure out.

Which explains why people like her struggle so immensely with computers and technology, and man it's exhausting to deal with.

Staying curious and having a sense of purpose will give you an edge 90% of people don’t have in adulthood.

That's a little 'thanks I'm cured' ...

the "smart and gifted" to "burnout" to "neurodivergence diagnosis" pipeline

it frustrates me to no end that society still hasn't realized we need to identify diagnoses earlier, it fucking SUCKS to figure it out after puberty and having to spend years internalizing that you're not a failure, you just need to do things differently.

Good thing my mom balanced it out by also calling me a worthless piece of shit.

"Gifted" often just means "received enough calories, stimulation, and affection growing up that you developed to your full human capacity".

It can't be understated how many people are on the spectrum from neglected to abused, in a way that drastically inhibits development. But we rephrase this immiseration as "normal", then treat the kids of wealthier parents as "special" because they hit basic human milestones, possibly while cultivating an unusual talent or hobby with abundant free time.

The gulf is real, but manufactured. And once you exit primary school, you get rebucketted into Normals and Specials again... and again and again and again.

That's what drives people insane, more than anything. The constant fear of being outside the next wall. The fear of abuse and neglect that comes with it.

I made the best grades in my year for nearly every year of my schooling from 1st grade up through junior year of high school. My dad would tell me that I was smart and gifted, and he would expect straight A's on my report card. If I ever brought home less than a perfect score I'd be punished for it.

My mom, though, always told me that gap was an illusion. Sure, I was a smart kid, but I wasn't doing anything anyone else couldn't. If I could do it so could they, and vice versa. If I wanted to keep that lead I needed to work for it - but more importantly that taught me not to feel superior to the other kids. I wasn't that special, I just learned new info easily.

I think that was really important for my developing empathy and maybe more smart kids need to hear that.

Also aids in bolstering intuition and the comprehension of nuance! Knowing "a little about a lot of things" means a very broad perspective which covers a lot of contingencies. It's a very good position from which to study the big picture, imo!

Edit: with the risk of getting lost in details, from personal experience.

but often times better than a master of one.

the best part of this is that you can just completely bullshit some people, confidently state something absurd and they just go "wow flying fishes evolved from birds? wild"

I just have ADHD and you don't even need autism. Just confidence.

I feel that so hard.

A while back, I was talking to a young electrical engineering student about how DACs do not produce the stairstep pattern that many textbooks and audiophile forums would lead you to believe. As the video in the link shows, you can create a sine wave with analog equipment, measure it on an analog oscilloscope, put it through a computer for ADC and then DAC, and measure the output on another analog oscilloscope. The sine wave you get on the output will be exactly the same as the input, excepting whatever line noise is introduced in the process. No stairstep at all.

In fact, if the stairstep were true, then square waves should come out perfect, not sine waves. It's just the opposite; square waves come out as a messy combination of sine waves. This is generally fine, as square waves don't really exist in nature, anyway.

Then the followup question came: DACs are built with a combination of voltage dividers (also known as a resistor ladder), which should produce just such a stairstep pattern. Why wouldn't it be a stairstep?

I couldn't remember what the hell the answer to that was at the moment, and probably came off like an idiot. The answer is that there's a low pass filter that takes care of that, but I'll be damned if I remembered that at the time.

I feel that so hard. I don't know anything about the math involving quantum mechanics but once you whip out the philosophical side of it its my time to shine.