Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

It is not unlikely that you will never get to the same league as 'the inventors'.

Most people are mediocre at everything they do and will always be. Most likely that includes you. We live in a culture that doesn't just tell everyone that they can easily outgrow mediocrity, no, this culture tells people they are above it from the very start.

The following advice doesn't apply to geniuses or those who can be, but it applies to the majority who will read this:

The best you can do is look back on your life and see if there is only mediocrity. If there is, you have to be honest with yourself and recognize if it's so because of factors that you can still change, or not. For most people reading this the latter will be the case, which means you simply have to live with it and stop trying to influence the world, because everything you end up doing is going to make things worse (for you, and everyone else).

> The following advice doesn't apply to geniuses or those who can be, but it applies to the majority who will read this:

When you can figure out which is which, you might be onto something. Until then this is a very...mediocre comment.

This comment is so annoying - the perfect HN mix of pretentious and nihilist.

If you really think that average people trying to create anything will make things worse, then you're probably fine with the entertainment-addiction cycle in the first place. Maybe you work for supercell.

At first, I was tempted to see this as a disappointing comment, promoting the idea of "If you didn't understand this early, you're not going to, no matter how hard you try, so stop trying," but I think what you could really be saying (correct me if I'm off) is that just because you want to do something, doesn't mean you know how to do it. So, trying to change things for the better takes some serious preparatory work that takes some time to do, learning alternate perspectives that will help you understand better what's really going on, and what tendencies people have that can be used, if people are willing, to help them realize what I've just described. However, if you don't have time for that, just acknowledge it, but also understand that you're not going to have a positive impact on that goal, because you haven't gotten out of your common sense perspective and natural urges, which are only going to make the problem worse if you try to make that impact, because you're not going to understand what you're doing. The comment Alan made at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940497 is indicative of this concern. However, in defense of this thread, I think everything that Alan has been talking about in here is an attempt to guide people toward learning how to learn so that for those who find the opportunity, they can give that advice a try, and see if this really is for them or not.

I believe this comment is not directed to people who are trying to create something, but to people who feel entitled/special because they are trying to create something they perceive as improvement for humanity.

Please don't respond to a bad comment by making a still worse comment. That just drags the thread down for everybody.

Although I can imagine ways to read this comment as a positively intended one, (a) they're not obvious and (b) this is too far afield and doesn't belong in this thread. So we've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11943951 and marked it off-topic.