I'm skeptical that experiments involving rubber hands are an effective way to gain social status.

Maybe that was a joke, but just in case it wasn't: It's not something I can prove here, but I said that because I assumed that the demonstration would impress someone in the same way that an optical illusion or a magic trick does. I'm not so impressed by magic tricks these days (unless they're absolutely nuts of course), but I can imagine that happening to a lot of people. And I think that it can be leveraged further than your average magician leverages a magic trick because the people at CFAR wouldn't just stop at 'magic tricks'; they would have other interesting exercises to show you: "Now that you've seen how your perceptions can be affected by heuristics, I'm going to show you how your thinking can be affected by them."

You have some decent arguments (though ChristianKI's critiques show where they need work), but I think the weirdness factor is just too high. Even if someone were personally convinced, what happens when they try to tell their friends?

Where do my arguments need work? If you're talking about ChristianKI suggesting that this could be empathy rather than the anticipation of pain, I don't think that that's the case here because, as I mentioned in my conversation with him below, some subjects reported mistaking the rubber hand for their 'real' hand:

Some subjects reported that the illusion was so convincing that they found themselves wondering why their hand was so white or how they had bruised their hand (there was a small ink smudge on the fake hand).

Some subjects also withdraw their 'real' hand from the experimenter as if it were at risk of injury:

[D]uring pilot work many subjects behaved as if they anticipated pain when the rubber finger was bent back: they laughed nervously, widely opened their eyes, flinched, and even pulled their real hand away from the experimenter (sufficient instruction prevented subject noise and movement during the experiments reported here).

I was really imagining this in the context of a CFAR workshop. I'm not sure how it would go for people trying to show/tell their friends about it either. I'm willing to bet that the success rate would be positively correlated with the amount and quality of the rationality training that the experimenter had received. What exactly do you mean by the 'weirdness factor?' Like: "Hey man; why are you coming towards me with that rubber hand?" I think that it would be pretty rare for people to just refuse to see the demonstration, because then they would look afraid or close-minded.

Mainly I found it very cool to read about Ramachandran and the table. It's especially interesting in the context of embodied cognition. If our mental lives are determined and made meaningful by the fact that we have physical bodies that we live in and have to make do stuff, how do we reconcile this with the notion that "There is a sense in which one’s body image is itself a ‘phantom’: one that the brain constructs for utility and convenience." ?

Slightly related to this and pretty cool in my opinion: I was thinking about this as I was falling asleep, and I looked at my body, and for a few seconds it looked like it was part of the environment instead of 'me.' It was pretty amazing.