I'm all for community-building activities, and I'd love to learn to dance, so I think this is an awesome idea. That said, something about the way this post and its comments are worded rubs me the wrong way entirely, and makes me want to avoid rationalist dance meetups and the LessWrong community in general. Since it seems that your goal is to recruit more rationalists, and I've been a long-time lurker on the outskirts of the rationalist community, I figured that it might be helpful if I explained my negative reaction. I've had similar negative reactions to many LessWrong posts, and it's part of why, although I consider myself a staunch Bayesian, I am reluctant to identify as a rationalist.

One of my problems with this post is the academic and impersonal wording used to describe the studies cited. (This complaint does not apply to the first two quoted passages.) Because of the detached and dispassionate wording, I imagine participants entering the rationalist dance meetup thinking "Tonight I'm going to manipulate System 1 into having good feelings about the rationalist community!" To me, this mindset seems incredibly fake: the eternal detachment and third-person analysis of our own experiences prevents us from fully engaging with the events at hand. If I were to attend such an event for community-building purposes, I would instead go into it thinking "Tonight I'm going to meet a bunch of cool people and have a really great time learning to dance!"

On a related note, I dislike the manipulative nature of this post. The opening paragraphs in particular suggest that a meetup organizer should be thinking "I am going to plan activities that will trick participants into bonding socially, in order to lure more people into joining the rationalist community." I think that a better perspective would be "I am going to plan activities which are fun, and which make people feel at home in the rationalist community; they will enjoy this meetup so much that they'll want to become rationalists!" Of course, these two statements are saying roughly the same thing, but the former treats people as pawns to be manipulated, while the latter treats people as... people. Really, if you're going to lead a meetup, you need to have empathy and treat the other participants as human beings with feelings. Otherwise, people are going to think you're a jerk and stop showing up. I don't mean to say that the meetup leaders are actually failing in this regard; rather, I'm claiming that the wording of this post fosters attitudes that are counterproductive to community-building.

Again, I really like this idea. The reason I am replying to this post is because the recent call for contrarians has given me the courage to speak up; it is not because I consider this post a particularly egregious offender of either of my complaints.