I think this is related enough and useful to mention. Feel free to downvote if I am wrong.
I am a student in this class taught by Scott Aaronson. Our class blog is linked there too, which may be of some value to LW readers. I think comments from people who are not enrolled in the class are okay, as long as they are sparse. The main point is for students to hash out their reactions to readings and in-class discussions, so if it becomes saturated with remote user comments, it may take away from the cohesive debate aspect.
The course is based around this essay which offers a lot of food for thought. I definitely think LW will get mixed into our discussions; I know a few other students who also regularly read LW.
I really like that essay, and it was linked here before. I would have liked to enroll in the course.
The key insights I took away from the paper are:
No, a waterfall isn't simulating a chess program, because the mapping from one to the other would be "doing all the work". IOW, you can only say one computation implements another if there's a polynomial time reduction between the two that benefits from having the other as an oracle, which is not the case for waterfalls and chess.
Different choices of language have no asymptotic impact on complex
Link.
Given the positive reactions, I think the professor seeded them with a positive impression of the site's content.