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orthonormal comments on No, Seriously. Just Try It. - Less Wrong
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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.)
Thanks, that was well put (as was the original post). I don't disagree with any of this, but wanted to point out that the hardwired results of evolution often can't be counteracted simply by explaining to the meat-brain that they are no longer adaptive.
I think that Luke's post would have been better served by an example in which the barrier to experimentation was, in fact, an irrational fear of something what won't really happen, rather than a rational fear of an irrational (but hardwired) negative emotional experience.
Do you have any evidence of this?
Or, since that is a bit tautological, do you have any evidence that the things we want to change (social interaction fears, for instance) are the unchangable "hardwired results of evolution", and not the malleable program running on top (for want of a better description)?
I think I may have been using the word "hardwired" a bit flippantly. I didn't mean something that is literally ROM, but something more like a deeply-worn river bed. I think it is possible to overcome many of our (collective and individual) irrational emotional responses, but it's not a trivial task. Steven's comment is right on the mark.
As to evidence, I don't have any that would distinguish between it being a result of evolution, and, say, something that many of our parents condition into us (which, of course, presumes a pre-existing response to negative parental feedback). I do have evidence that these sorts of things are not entirely - or even mostly - under conscious control.
I think the dichotomy you create of "hardwired" vs. "malleable" is a little bit too simplistic: there is a whole spectrum of brain-habits which run the gamut between them. "The Agile Gene" (popular science...) discusses this issue fairly extensively.
It's one thing to say they can be changed, and another to say they can be changed just by being informed of the relevant evpsych.
In the spirit of OP, since there's no guaranteed way to overcome this form of social anxiety and the afflictee will need to try many things to see what works for them, listening to a good evpsych story is as good a thing to try as any.