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If you like, feel free to abandon this post and read this instead: Beyond Elon Don’t worry, the title is basically clickbait, but the essay itself is very good, and says what I’d like to say myself, very well. If you’re still here, or have come back … When I was at school, the teachers loved me. I was the kind of child they went into the career for. I came from nowhere, a family with no expectations that had nobody with a university background, and I picked up pretty much everything effortlessly....

We humans think we’re great. We also think that what humans are good at must be most important, and overestimate how good we are. When evolution arrived as a theory, it had a tough job convincing everybody, as is well known. Scepticism runs deep about it even now, partly because it’s deeply unintuitive. Looking at the world, we see that it’s full of amazingly functional things working together. Considering that we, as humans, spend a lot of our time trying to create functional things, it’s very difficult not to imagine that what we see is deliberately designed to do what it does....

Bear with me, we’re going on a little thought experiment journey. You may, at some points, feel disoriented or wish to get out. The exits are there, there and there. Ready? We start inside your head, at this very instant. You are you, you are here, this is now. If you’re like most people, you have a very strong sense that you have a self, and that instant is part of a flow that self is experiencing in time, with a past and a future....

I only really trust someone’s judgement when I know they’ve changed their mind on something important. Sometimes I’ve said this publicly, and people bristle. Changing your mind isn’t seen as positive. Being right is important, and sticking to things is strong. People like being right, and want to be seen as strong. The important fact, though, is that those two things are opposed to each other. Most people arrive at adulthood with a fairly firm set of opinions about the world....

More than ten years after I left school, my old secondary headteacher rang my parents and asked for me. She had a painting of mine. Back in that odd time halfway through GCSEs, fifteen years old, after mock exams, after the older children had left school entirely, but before the summer holiday, the school had arranged a week of “activities” rather than lessons. I chose to spend the whole week doing art....