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Kaj_Sotala comments on Ritual Report 2012: Life, Death, Light, Darkness, and Love. - Less Wrong
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The particular problem with the ritual is that unlike the other things, it seems to exist only for the purpose of community-building. Opting out of the other activities makes your cognitive dissonance module say "well, maybe I don't like fanfiction / board games / decision theory that much", which isn't that bad. Opting out of the ritual makes the cognitive dissonance module say "well, maybe I don't care that much for being a community member", which is a bit more unfortunate.
Then there's also the small thing where the nonsensical community forming rituals have popped up in every human culture everywhere as far back as we know anything about human cultures, and always tend to develop the side effect of the socially gelled people favoring each other a bit more over the boring people who don't bother to play along with the rituals. This is what the social instinct response is about, not paranoia about hooded murderers going about stabbing people one night. Traditional societies seem to end up with all members participating in whatever the local ritual is, because that's the guarantee for belonging in the in-group and the other in-group members having your back. If you don't see the point in the ritual, tough. The social cohesion mechanism wasn't built for you, just smile and play-act along for the bit of extra guarantee that someone might have food to spare for you as well on the next famine year.
Hmm... although I've never been to any of these rituals, but from reading the descriptions, it hasn't been my impression that it would exist only for community-building. For example, I found the description of the 2011 ritual touching on an emotional level even though I was reading it all alone at home, and I expect that the rituals would also have given me a strong emotional kick that wasn't directly related to the group bonding aspect. Going out to a movie with friends would probably be a good analogy: being in a group does enhance the experience, and the group bonding is a plus, but the main reason we go there is the movie itself.
The social bonding and getting to meet new folks was not what gave me a strong feeling of "man, I want to participate in that" when I read the description of the original ritual. In fact, all of the social bonding stuff was just extra: a nice plus, but hardly the point. What attracted me was, well, the ritual itself: the feeling that it could give me a deep, lasting emotional experience that'd move me to the core, a faint echo of which I felt while reading the post. That would ultimately be a solitary and personal experience, even if I needed the presence of a group to help me achieve it.
This isn't at all unlike what I imagine the ingroup-strengthening response to ritual to feel from the inside.
What I was trying to say was that I don't think that its level of "(only community building)-ness" is much higher than that of board games or fan fiction. A little higher, maybe, but not that much. I don't know if I'd feel differently if I'd actually participated in such a ritual, though.