"hi, can I buy you a drink?" is also bad for other reasons, because this often opens a kind of transactional model of things where there's kind of an idea that you're buying her time, either for conversation or for other more intimate activities later. Now, this isn't explicitly the case, but it can get really awkward, so I'd seriously caution against opening with it.
I feel like I read something interesting about this on Mark Manson's blog but it's horribly organized so I can't find it now.
"hi, can I buy you a drink?" is also bad for other reasons, because this often opens a kind of transactional model of things where there's kind of an idea that you're buying her time, either for conversation or for other more intimate activities later. Now, this isn't explicitly the case, but it can get really awkward, so I'd seriously caution against opening with it.
That sort of things vary a lot depending on what kind of culture you're in.
r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.