How do you approach the problem of social discovery?

You go where the smart people go. Local LW meetups are for example full of cool people. Hackerspaces and QS meetups are also full of people with intelligence and openness.

Historically, I've made myself extremely stalkable on the Internet.

I don't think that's true. You have an image of a bird as your Quora avatar instead of a image of your face. Most people have a better memory for faces than for names.

I have long made an explicit practice of trying to be a social supernode. It pays off, it really does. (Today's example: free Skype speech therapy sessions for my daughter from a friend I haven't seen in a decade, who I met because another online friend had mentioned to her that I was in the same city.)

What is this "social discovery" term? Do you mean just, like, meeting people, networking, and making friends?

Moving to a big city should also help. Currently I am living in a relatively thinly populated region of a bit less than a million people. Is there material on this, that is choosing the right city for onself? It gets ridiculous how fast choices shrink the more constraints one sets.

I'm mostly not very good at this sort of thing. I think it's because outings and coordinating with other people to do things together make me tired, so I set my threshold for trying to make plans with someone pretty high. This is probably a bad thing. Potential solutions would be figuring out how to meet more people who I like enough to want to make the extra effort to spend time with them, or doing things with people even when it doesn't feel worth it to account for social benefits that I tend to forget about.

In what contexts do you (directed at everyone, not just OP) usually meet people? The last time I was in a new city without being in school, I attended the LW meetup group and met some friends of one of my friends through his board game club, and that was about it. I couldn't think of any others that seemed worth it. (I was both living and working an hour from the city center, which probably didn't help with people-discovery.)

I think you're picking the wrong problem. This doesn't have to be dealt with on the object level. If you're not socially anxious you're social discovery autopilot works fine. One thing that helps me with social anxiety is to visualise myself in the 'close embrace' of Argentine Tango with other people.

I think at some level, social anxiety, particular when it manifests in relation to the opposite sex has to do with misunderstandings about what makes for positive sexual experiences. It's about instinctive interest, awareness and communications of authentic desire to fulfill our drive for autonomy, feelings of competence about what we're doing sexually, and feelings of intimacy, desiredness, loved and respected to fulfill our need to relate to others. When I keep that in mind in non-sexual social settings, I feel myself come in my zone!

I'm part of the swing and blues dance scene in the Baltimore/DC area. There are a lot of nerdy/intellectual types in this scene so there's really no shortage of finding intelligent people to talk to. And the people I know who fit that type isn't limited to Baltimore/DC; I travel around a lot for dancing (Las Vegas, Montreal, London, etc.) and a lot of the same type of people are in the scene internationally.

I've been doing this for about 10 years so I'm also somewhat well connected. There's almost always some dance party to go to on the weekend in some city that I can drive to.

I live in DC and am an instigator of things (mostly theatre outings, debate, etc). That makes it easy to pull someone into my social circle, since there's usually a movie night, play outing, Shakespeare reading I'm hosting withing the next three weeks to invite them too. (And wanting to be invited to that sort of thing is an excellent filter from my end to see that I will like them).

If you are on the extrovert side of the spectrum it may make sense to become an even more connected super-node. And there may be economics of scale when doing everything online.

But if you are an introvert the cost of becomming a super-node may be too high for you personally. I take it that it doesn't suffice to just publish everything online (and 'everything' here appears to include everyday chatter). You have to reply to emails and friend requests and such.

I'm an introvert and I'm trying to become better networked here in LW but that is demanding already. I can't even imagine becoming or being a social center.

Great question. I am interested in improving the sophistication of my own social discovery engine and aim to make more notes here as I get more proficient.

When I first met this one friend ('L.G') people told me he was unreliable. I didn't see evidence for that and disregarded the vindication of most everyone who had known him, including some of my trusted confidants. Now I have been burned by my naivity and have learned to trust the intuitions of my trusted peers and not to risk my own for those who go out of their way to impress me.

Um. Your links lead to the following sentences:

"That's how I found the right peers (all over the Internet), despite losing all my real-life friends."

and

"What were Alex K Chen's best decisions of his life? Persuading my parents to finally get me Age of Empires II"

...