I expect that Scott's friend generally had a great experience at the camp and made a somewhat flippant and self-deprecating comment that was appropriate in a social context, but wasn't Scott's friend's most important takeaway from the experience.
And then in a few months everyone promptly returned to their status quo ante minicamp ... or at least, the available results are observationally equivalent thereto.
Your statement is false as a matter of fact. We have a one-year life-outcomes followup study planned, but the preliminary indications don't fit with 'status quo', and there are plenty of participant comments on the LW thread which explicitly say otherwise. Stop making stuff up.
Also, I don't think a regular LW meetup would be described as involving "teaching people to be less socially awkward".
I've followed LessWrong, and I hadn't heard anything, until the GP, about it giving off such an aura of "the blind leading the blind".