BTW, it's nice to see that Dyson is 88 and still sharp enough to write this well.
Doesn't mean too much; Dyson started off with a lot of raw ability, obviously, and if you look at the graphs, things like vocabulary or facts are the categories that decline very little or actually increase with age. I don't believe Dyson is inventing any new ideas in his writing, and the ones I hear about like geoengineering tend to be controversial and possible things that he would one day regret espousing.
Freeman Dyson writes in the New York Review of Books about people who took up the crackpot offer. Not just complete cranks, but eminent scientists such as Eddington who got into crankery in their later years.
New thing I learnt: Dyson was not only a good friend of Immanuel Velikovsky, but considers him a greatly underappreciated poet.