"He" is the operating word. The fox and the sour grapes.
I think that the person who commented about him was female, though I don't remember for sure.
I can understand why someone might not want to be seen by people he knows when he's doing random cold approaches on the street.
Why not? IME wingmen provide social proof. (Though there are cultural differences from place to place -- for example, I would do that in the town where I study now but not where I grew up, as most of the population of the latter respond to random cold approaches on the street by frowning at you then looking away.)
I think that in both domains that you will get more status over the long term if you invest in professional training which costs money to build your skills.
Yes, but 1) I'm already 26, so I dunno how much sense it still makes to invest in "the long term" in this kind of things, and 2) the difference would be only noticed by people who are themselves sufficiently high-status in those domains (I've already had several people who asked me where I took singing classes and seemed surprised where I told them that I didn't), so I'm not sure the game is worth the candle given that I'm not looking for a professional career in singing. (I might try to take singing and/or dancing classes next year if I'm not as strapped for time as now, but it's not a priority.)
I am beginning to suspect that it is surprisingly common for intelligent, competent adults to somehow make it through the world for a few decades while missing some ordinary skill, like mailing a physical letter, folding a fitted sheet, depositing a check, or reading a bus schedule. Since these tasks are often presented atomically - or, worse, embedded implicitly into other instructions - and it is often possible to get around the need for them, this ignorance is not self-correcting. One can Google "how to deposit a check" and similar phrases, but the sorts of instructions that crop up are often misleading, rely on entangled and potentially similarly-deficient knowledge to be understandable, or are not so much instructions as they are tips and tricks and warnings for people who already know the basic procedure. Asking other people is more effective because they can respond to requests for clarification (and physically pointing at stuff is useful too), but embarrassing, since lacking these skills as an adult is stigmatized. (They are rarely even considered skills by people who have had them for a while.)
This seems like a bad situation. And - if I am correct and gaps like these are common - then it is something of a collective action problem to handle gap-filling without undue social drama. Supposedly, we're good at collective action problems, us rationalists, right? So I propose a thread for the purpose here, with the stipulation that all replies to gap announcements are to be constructive attempts at conveying the relevant procedural knowledge. No asking "how did you manage to be X years old without knowing that?" - if the gap-haver wishes to volunteer the information, that is fine, but asking is to be considered poor form.
(And yes, I have one. It's this: how in the world do people go about the supposedly atomic action of investing in the stock market? Here I am, sitting at my computer, and suppose I want a share of Apple - there isn't a button that says "Buy Our Stock" on their website. There goes my one idea. Where do I go and what do I do there?)