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army1987 comments on College courses versus LessWrong - Less Wrong
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Or you want someone to give you feedback on your homework and answer your questions (and hence a chance to clear up your misconceptions), or you want hands-on experience with lab equipment, or you want to socialize with other people interested in the same things, or you want to be able to legally access papers behind a paywall for free, or...
I mentioned Physics Forums for math and physics, where you'd get all the feedback you could ever desire.
Valid point.
Why would you need college for that? If you keep procrastinating about getting out there and trying to meet people, college is a good way to self-bind oneself into feeling an obligation to show up somewhere on a regular basis that may lead to success in that area. But otherwise you could find people elsewhere.
Another valid point.
Overall though, I wouldn't say you contradicted anything in my post. I absolutely did not say that going to college wouldn't be a useful endeavor for plenty of people. It's just that the reasons to go certainly have nothing to do with the quality of instruction or something like that, which is what the OP was about.
Socialization is qualitatively very different when you live in the same building as people who share your interests. Without this, every meeting has to be planned days in advance, and bootstrapping a friendship to the point where people are even willing to make plans with you is a huge hassle. I found this feature of college extremely valuable and many others do as well, even if you would not. (It's true that this is really a feature of dorms, and classes themselves don't help much with meeting people, but it's still part of the experience, and how else are you going to concentrate hundreds of smart STEM-interested people into one or two city blocks?)
I guess that only applies in large cities with poor means of transportation. I often meet up with people on a half hour's notice, and there are Schelling points where we can go and meet up without even having to make explicit plans at all.
Physics forums is not an adequate replacement for putting 6 people and a pizza together in a room with a whiteboard. The internet is great and all, but it's simply not as easy to communicate half-formed ideas, and build off someone else's poorly-thought-out insight over the web.
Communicating in meatspace with people I know personally is much more effective than over the Internet with strangers, all other things being equal (at least for me -- YMMV).
Like where? Not only would I have no idea where to find half a dozen physicists hanging out together in my home town, I'm not even sure there are that many physicists at all there.
What? Except possibly for the socializing thing, all the things I mentioned have to do with instruction.