One aspect of learning anything is that you have to risk making mistakes. Possibly, in your mind you view the cost of making mistakes in social situations to b

One aspect of learning anything is that you have to risk making mistakes. Possibly, in your mind you view the cost of making mistakes in social situations to be much greater than the cost of making mistakes in machine learning. Mess up in machine learning, and you just kill the process, fix the code and run it again. No one needs to know. Mess up in a social situation and every one will find out, you will be judged harshly and they will think of you as a failure and will never let you forget it. The key to getting over this is to teach yourself that actually making mistakes in a social situation is no big deal and people are actually pretty forgiving. The only way to teach yourself this is to take that risk and find out for yourself.