"Lots of people take up tango and other dances to learn social skills."
Either it doesn't help much (I'm just a blunt an instrument as I used to be, just to take a sample of one) or the self-selected sample of tango dancers biases the results (i.e. tango attracts followers that had even poorer social skills before they took up tango).
I don't know what'd be worse, actually.
Mind you, I'm not saying that tango followers are particularly bad, just that the small-mindedness and pettiness I see in some of the scenes for my other niche interests infect the local tango scene just as much as the other scenes.
Surprisingly, tango also doesn't seem to let people learn a set of social skills that travel well and make people compatible and bridge cultural divides; by now I've given up on making Germans and a well-known tango blogger living in BsAs grok each other through 'the shared set of tango values'.
