Reading this, I wonder why a LDS missionary got interested in a rationalist community which is generally hostile to religion. I would appreciate some explanation about the author's motivations. Strictly speaking, this is irrelevant to the message, but being confused about one's aims somewhat lowers my trust in one's suggestions. This is not to say that the suggestions themselves are suspicious or clearly wrong - on the contrary, they are written in an impartial style that very well fits into LW customs, which makes me even more curious about the author's background.

On a slightly different note, there is only so much one can improve on the organisational level, and we should keep in mind what expectations do we have from this community. In a sense, I second the Vladimir Nesov's and cousit_it's comments. Community building is instrumentally important, but really shouldn't become a major terminal value if we want to maintain a high level of rationality. Aspiring rationalists are in a danger of wandering in a strange circle: at first, they crave for getting rid of common biases and developing abilities for efficient truth seeking. But then, these very abilities lead them to discover that sometimes, an efficient way to do things is to compromise with human biology and use techniques which cooperate with the biases instead of fighting them. Often it turns out that the best techniques are already implemented by somebody - church missionaries for example - just because it is hard to compete with memes perfected by centuries-long testing and evolution.

In short, I am afraid that if we put too much weight into values (as community building) pursued by non-rationalist groups, it is likely that the most efficient methods are possessed by those non-rational groups (like churches) and we should (instrumentally) learn from them (as this series of posts claims). This wouldn't be itself bad if these methods weren't optimised for different sets of goals. It is very easy to adopt few manipulation techniques to strengthen the community coherence and be astonished by their efficacy while being completely unaware of all the non-obvious ways how these techniques undermine the main goal, which is rationality. When people start realising that something has gone wrong, it may be too late. We have already the label of dark arts for efficient but dangerous procedures. Some LWers may have already grown enough confident to believe that they can use the dark arts without being harmed. I am not so optimistic.