How do we let them know the rapture of the nerds is coming?

Matt Bell remarks about the blind spot that many futurists exhibit with respect to the organisational and effort-leveraging capabilities of the religious, whom those futurists regard as "too dumb or narrow-minded to understand futurist concepts like the Singularity."

I don't think this class of blind spot is necessarily limited to futurists; many people who are experts in some area develop the belief that everyone else is too dumb or narrow-minded to understand their area of expertise. Lawyers, for instance, or accountants, or auto mechanics, or really anyone whose income relies on maintaining and being able to use a specialised body of knowledge.

When I reflect on this, I find that I have the impression that the people who are most prone to this belief are self-taught or mostly so. This surprises me, because I'd expect autodidacts to be more appreciative of people's ability to learn outside of an established pedagogical system!

But assuming that my impression is correct, which it may very well not be, I can see a few reasons why it might be the case. One is that autodidactic learning is highly specialised to the learner, and the learning methods that work for person X might not work as well for person Y. But if X's only experience with learning a field or skill is idiosyncratic(1), X may have a difficult time communicating to Y about how to learn in this area. "It worked for me! If it doesn't work for you then I guess you're just too dumb to get your head around it." Which is facially untrue; as you point out, it's X's own blind spot with respect to pedagogy that leads X to this conclusion. Futurism, insofar as it is a discipline at all, is a discipline of autodidacts; it's knitted together from so many different fields that while an individual may be a pedagogically trained expert in one area, such as computer science or biology, getting a full understanding of the class of problems that futurists want to solve requires self-driven learning.

I've noticed that people who do hands-on work, like plumbing or car repair, are often better at communicating not only the "what"s but also the "why"s and "how"s of their knowledge. Again, I can see a few factors that contribute to this. A system like an engine may be quite complicated, but the process of diagnosing and repairing a single problem (say, cylinder not firing) can be used as a jumping-off point to illustrate how the entire system works as a whole (viewed through the lens of how the performance of the car is negatively affected). Do this enough times with enough problems, and you've successfully trained a new auto mechanic, because your student has gained the hands-on experience to recognize problems and understand what components of the system are responsible for those problems, in what ways. Futurism is also a problem-solving discipline; the problems it seeks to answer are mainly of the form "There isn't enough X in the world" (where X = years of life available to each human, strong AI, space travel, whatever). It's easy to get someone to understand why you would want to be able to fix a car; getting someone to understand why you would want to fix an existential problem might first require getting them to understand that the problem is a problem in the first place, but if you can communicate that, then communicating what you want to do about it becomes purposeful. I wonder how often the "dumb, narrow-minded" opinion gets formed because a specialist was trying to explain a solution to something which the hearer hadn't considered as a problem? It's hard to stay interested in evaluating a solution if one hasn't explored the problem space oneself at least a little bit, and even harder to make a meaningful evaluation!

It occurs to me that there are two religious groups which use this mentor/apprentice model to great effect: the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses. Both send out missionaries, door-to-door, to engage people in conversations about problems. If a missionary concludes that the person doesn't consider the topic to be a problem and that s/he can't convince the person that it is ("no, I'm not concerned about my immortal soul because I don't have one, have a nice day"), s/he can move on quickly. The goal, however, is to find people who are receptive to the notion of the problem, spend some time assessing them through conversation, then get them to commit to meeting up again (perhaps after reading some literature) to talk further so that the missionary can present their (or, rather, their church's) solution. They're not just spreading memes, they're incubating them.

Now, I personally find door-to-door missionaries an annoying interruption and I think I would be pretty irritated if a transhumanist showed up on my doorstep to offer me a tract and asked "Have you ever thought about whether you could live forever?" But, again taking a cue from Christianity, I think the idea of "witnessing" to people about futurist ideas -- in the sense of getting them intrigued and excited -- in a casual setting, like Matt's airport conversation, has a lot of power. Much ink has been spilled on the subject of doing this from a religious angle; again, there's a lot more organisation there than many people may give religious groups credit for ;)

(1) I totally almost typed "idiosocratic" there.