No, Seriously. Just Try It.

I'd willingly take a pill that made me less unhappy about failed social interactions, and it's on my to-hack list.

People have long taken it in liquid form, called "beer". A pill form, MDMA, has also had popularity in some circles. Both of these require thought about how they will interact with most of daily life, however.

Put it this way: find a new one, and you will become rich. Until it's banned.

It occurs to me that when I'm reluctant to chat up a stranger, it's not "actual" external consequences that I fear, so much as my own feelings of embarrassment, shame, etc (note: I've no idea if this is true for others).

This is true for others as well, and it's a great example of the way that organisms are adaptation-executors and not fitness-maximizers. Instead of evolving organisms that calculated the actual social costs of rejection and feared rejection to that degree, it was easier to evolve organisms that experienced pain when they were rejected, and then fine-tune the degree of pain to match the average social cost. The downside, of course, is that when the social costs of rejection changed faster than genes can keep up, we found ourselves maladapted.

(This is basically what Luke said, but I thought the expanded version might help.)

Let's not forget the converse: Fear that the other person will be creeped out. No, you'll never see them again, but you still don't want to make a random person's day more creepy.

(This I have recently learned seems to be actually largely unjustified, but it was a big thing stopping me from doing this until then...)

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Roberts' hypothesis is not about the drinking vegetable oil particularly, it's about the link between flavour intensity, calories and weight gain/loss. He was looking for a way to ingest a sudden high calorie, no taste thing. Flavourless vegetable oil is no-flavour/high-calorie - and so is his previous idea of fructose disolved in water.

A useful followup might be "Just try what?"

Suggestions:

A) Whatever it is you want to try, but are putting off

B) Whatever it is you don't want to do and can't do, but feel like you should be able to in order to be a "proper" adult, or a "real" {your job title}, or an ideal human, or whatever.

I would love to see this post! Although I suspect it might end up being highly individual, since the dilemna of which hypotheses to test is closely related to which questions you want to answer.

my answer to this question has become: 1) Research the topic 2) gather many ancedotes and strategies 3) try them 4) as my pool of suggested actions runs low, either brainstorm or go and gather more.

I'm not sure about the ancestral environment explanation. On one hand, you're relatively stuck with the people in your tribe, but on the other hand, they can't afford to throw away useful people.

I haven't heard anything about how status and harassment work in modern hunter-gatherer tribes, so I don't know whether the costs of mistakes are higher there or in modern high-tech societies.

One clue might come from the various situations of deaf people. There are (were?) a couple of isolated communities where 1 in 6 people were deaf. Everyone knew sign language, and hearing or deafness wasn't considered an important feature.

Another clue comes from social groups and families. It can take a lot for an obnoxious person to be pressured or ostracized-- it's socially cheaper to keep them around than to deal with their difficult habits.

I believe that one aspect of modern wealth is that it's more feasible to throw people away by various means of exclusion-- there are plenty of more people available immediately. This wouldn't have been true for hunter-gatherers.

Next you ask someone out, after determining that they are single, only to find out that "I'm not looking for a boyfriend right now." Now you know to determine that people are looking for boyfriends before asking them out.

"I'm not looking right now" might as well be an excuse, what she really wants to say may be "You are not really interesting enough for me to consider you as a potential boyfriend." In that case the correct answer would be to become more interesting, and here you have one of the basic ideas of pick up.

My experience is that the bar for comments is not that high. I comment relatively frequently, don't have a lot of deep insights or anything, but have gotten few downvotes (AFAIK), and net karma 97 as of this writing.

Ah but think about an actual (habit) problem you have had and see how many courses of action you can think of. In my experience many of them will help, and so trying in order of probability is a great way to find what might help. The just try it method pivots you from a moaning/accepting of problems attitude to: I can solve this, I just don't know how. But I know how I (probably) can find out how.

Of course it is difficult to be objective enough to identify real trends...

Thanks. Added.