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CronoDAS comments on Let them eat cake: Interpersonal Problems vs Tasks - Less Wrong
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I wasn't trying to communicate a thoroughly systematic method for acquiring social skills, so I confess that this phrase may have been a bit vague.
That said, it's English, not a formal language. "Just get out of the house" does not mean, "position yourself in some location X such that X is not a member of the subset of locations within your house."
The expression means that one should get out of the house and go to places that are conducive to some form of social interaction. Appropriate places vary tremendously from person to person, which is why the phrase is so non-specific. But if you pick some social event or scene where there are likely to be people vaguely similar to you, and you keep going to these events, there's a pretty good chance you'll meet interesting people and get better at socializing generally, if you need work at that. Hell, as long as you pick some social event where you don't actually have contempt for everyone there, and you keep going out even after things go poorly, you're probably going to do OK.
You can't expect to be a great skier the first time you hit the slopes, and if you give up because you're falling too much, you'll never even be a competent skier. You can't expect to have decent social skills if you don't make a sincere effort to socialize. I understand that, in some cases, people sincerely try, deal with falling down a lot, keep trying, and still fail. I admit I have no easy solution for that. But I think that's a pretty small minority of cases. If I'm wrong about that, please correct me.
I've had some success at meeting people and having conversations with them. On the other hand, anime conventions are bad for meeting someone you hope to see a second time, because, chances are, the person you're talking to lives in another state or something.
Look for small, local conventions - they're often hosted by universities. There might be one in your area. Of course, those have a tendency to foom if they're any good (like Connecticon), so it's a moving target.
I'm not sure this is good advice. Cons (and especially anime cons, which tend to skew a lot younger) depend on leading a lot of socially awkward people to talk to each other, and as such basically live or die by the skills of their organizers. If you're restricting yourself to small local cons, and you're not very lucky, you naturally get organizers who are either inexperienced or incompetent.
That's tolerable if you already know a good chunk of the attendees. But if not, it's hard to overestimate how bad this can go. When I last attended a similar con, for example, I met several people I immediately disliked, attracted one (1) stalker, and enjoyed the spectacle of an attendee being dragged out by the police after getting too handsy with his partner at a cosplay event. I did not meet anyone new that I'd have cared to meet again.