Another way to build up social confidence might be to repeatedly get rejected by asking lots of extremely attractive people out on dates. The goal here is to numb yourself to the emotional costs of rejection through repeated exposure.

And I would suggest that this additional form of training is going to be overwhelmingly hard to avoid picking up along the way. If you aren't getting repeatedly rejected then I think you must be doing something wrong.

Unless the rejection is accompanied by occasional successes, this may be a good way to lower your self-esteem. The trick is learning to accept rejection - using each opportunity to succeed and learning from each failed attempt.

It's a mind hack to help one consider fellow LWers as part of one's "tribe".

It seems to me to be a rationality skill, in the sense of consciously exploiting human cognitive biases in the service of one's own goals.

Or it's a very mild form of cult "love bombing".