(peeks at comment history) Aw, it would be really cool if you could make it, you sound really interesting to talk to!

I do find going to meetings of people I don't know difficult -- I worry about people having social expectations I don't want to meet (which is unhelpfully abstract and I find it difficult to come up with a good example, but perhaps this gives the idea: being asked what I like on TV and people finding it strange if I don't watch very much TV at all). I've gotten better with this over the years, but going to a completely new group still doesn't feel easy. FWIW (n=1) I found the first LW meetup I went to pleasantly undemanding in that direction (of course the above example is misleading there, I wouldn't have expected watching little TV to sound weird in an LW context). Anyway, if there's something others could do to help, you could let us know here in advance?

(Can I ask -- it sounds like you're doing your MSc in experimental psychology, right? How did you get there from linguistics -- are you doing psycholinguistics, or are you shifting fields? I just started my PhD in an interdisciplinary project on decision-making, and though the majority of my own training is in maths, I have one of my three or four disciplinary legs in psychology -- it would be cool to be able to talk to somebody with an LW perspective about psychology topics!)