Right after I started first grade, and later again when we learned about democracy.<p>I'm autistic, and just before first grade I found a science/physics book and I was absolutely amazed. I spent all my days reading, thinking about the universe and trying to understand the stuff, and I was imagining that I'll go to school and me and my friends would study science after school, as who wouldn't want to? Learning scientific method also gave me relief, as I was always struggling with thoughts if I'm wrong about anything I believe as I had no ways to confirm - like half my day was spent thinking "could I be wrong on X", but now finally I could perform tests to adjust my confidence.<p>When the school started, I was amazed to find out nobody wanted to learn science and the scientific method, they did not care at all. But much stranger was that people didn't care at all if they're correct or not. If somebody told me I'm wrong about something and I couldn't 100% confirm which one of us is wrong, I'd lose my sleep and spend hours / days trying to confirm the validity of our claims. But when I told people I can prove them wrong, and I have the books I can show so they don't need to trust me at all - it just never mattered. They wouldn't spend five minutes proving themselves wrong, they'd just look at me like I'm insane and continued their day without giving it another thought. It was mind-blowing, compared to my constant crippling self-doubt.<p>So when we studied democracy, my first thought is that some evil greedy people will be using this feature of humans to tell them what they want to hear while taking advantage of them, and that new technology will make it easier to surveil people and also to make massive global damage compared to localized tragedies.<p>Obviously I thought I was wrong, like I always did. The humanity has survived for a long time, and I'm just observing a tiny slice, would be really unlikely to be born just at the time when brown hits the fan. But nowadays it feels like I was way more correct than I could even have imagined at the time..