I have approximate knowledge of many rules

ooh i can actually speak to this! yes i know lots of nothing, but that nothing builds like a snowball, and then one day you wake up and are in your mid 30s and all those things you know are now expertises and people start to rely on you for that.

trust the process, you will keep learning more as time goes on and you will be able to put that to use. just not in your 20s. your 20s is where your dreams go to die temporarily

damn bro, you didn't have to call out me like that

The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

I know that I don't know.

Jack of All Trades are useful and needed. Cross discipline interaction is where innovations and fun new ideas happen.

So much love for my neurodivergent homies. AuDHD me has an approximate knowledge of things I can't control. Can I quote the majority of Shrek 2? Ofc. Did I make any effort to do so? No

Eh. Most people don't even have this. It's great to be a specialist, but a well rounded generalist is valuable as well. Some of the most creative people are are dilatantes as they are able to synthesize new things by combining knowledge of disparate categories. Staying curious and having a sense of purpose will give you an edge 90% of people don't have in adulthood.

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' ...
- I agree and disagree. If they were telling you "just stay curious to get ahead" then I would agree, but in the specific context it came off, to me, more along the lines of "this is a goal you can work towards. Find ways to make yourself curious and find a sense of purpose."
  
  You'll still have to find what ways you can use to work on yourself, but that's where therapy and introspection come in, not internet strangers

A jack of all trades, but master of none...

Is often times better than a master of one :)

You are smart! You just probably have ADHD. I used to feel the same way, but I eventually realized that I really don't think like others. My approximate knowledge is limited, but I can still leverage it to actually have advantages compared to others.

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.
- It's a shame the concept of an "ideas man" has been ridiculed for so long, because that's precisely what it lets you be good at.
  If you can put together a jack of all trades to spawn vaguely sensible ideas, and someone who hyperfocuses on a field of interest, you can just churn out good ideas that are well on the way to being implementable.
but often times better than a master of one.
Oh I should get better at lying

I had a huge realization a few days ago and it unlocked a lot mentally for me.

It's okay to not be a master of anything, because by becoming a master you sacrifice your broadness of knowledge. Keep being yourself, enjoy learning new stuff. Forcing myself into trying to be a master of something made me depressed and unhappy with my life.

You always hear about masters of a domain, but this branch is not fit to everyone and it's okay. Capitalism and elitism makes it difficult to see that.

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.
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

Broke: Suffering from imposter syndrome because you know just enough to get invited through the door but not enough to feel competent in your role.

Woke: Recognizing that your information will always be imperfect and you're growing into your role just like your predecessors did. Trying to meet the expectations of your peers through personal development and effort.

Bespoke: You're a super-spy double agent who has fooled them all! Now you're going to bring this entire organization down from the inside through the most insidious forms of sabotage.

calm down, Okabe!

Shout out for what I believe approximately to be an Adventure Time reference

indeed it is
- That was the funniest bit in the series for me

I think it’s also critical thinking skills that most people lack. So when you use critical thinking to analyze a situation you don’t know anything about, they are impressed.

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.
- Lol, I try not to judge people that don’t have that ability to solve problems cause I think people’s brains are just wired differently. But yes, it can be exhausting!

A lot of damage is done by parents telling their kids that they are special and gifted.

I know they mean to be kind. It's just that reality always turns up like the Kool-aid man.

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.
- You might be a worthless piece of shit, but you're our worthless piece of shit 🫂
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.
- Growth mindset vs fixed mindset. If you tell a kid they're smart when they succeed and they don't get an A, they think "oh, this means I'm actually not smart and I never will be. If some people can be naturally smart, I guess I just naturally suck as a person". If you tell a kid that hard work gets As and they get a B, they think "oh, I just need to work harder and try again next time".
- Would be great if we weren't constantly stack ranking kids. Humans perform better as a team than as a bunch of atomized at-each-others-throats individuals.
"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.

The feeling of being autistic and have ADHD, but people just ASSUME you know what you’re talking about because you speak with confidence and are “the smartest person here”.

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.

Or you can do what I do: skip past the surface level stuff and find out what the experienced folks have to say about the abstract philosophical essence of the thing.

People will be amazed at the depth of your knowledge!

Almost as amazed as they’ll be when you can’t answer any of the most obvious practical questions immediately after.

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.
- Careful. Tons of grifters and magical thinkers claim that their pseudoscientific nonsense is backed by quantum mechanics for that very reason (hardly anybody on the planet understands it). It's not.
  
  So when someone says, "the philosophical side" when referring to quantum mechanics, forgive me if my woo-radar goes off...