LW has a problem. Openly or covertly, many posts here promote the idea that a rational person ought to be able to self-improve on their own. Some of it comes from Eliezer's refusal to attend college (and Luke dropping out of his bachelors, etc). Some of it comes from our concept of rationality, that all agents can be approximated as perfect utility maximizers with a bunch of nonessential bugs. Some of it is due to our psychological makeup and introversion. Some of it comes from trying to tackle hard problems that aren't well understood anywhere else. And some of it is just the plain old meme of heroism and forging your own way.
It's simply wrong to say that self-directed improvement doesn't work. Many people make lots of progress with self-reflection, reading, intentional practice, etc.
It would be equally correct (and equally misleading) to say "classes don't work". Personally, I dropped out of college after 2 years because I just wasn't getting enough from the structured, semi-useful coursework. There's LOTS of studies that show extremely weak correlation between class time (at reasonable margins, correcting for other factors) and later achievement.
Presumably, the best for any individual is some idiosyncratic mix of the two. In fact, it takes a fair bit of self-reflection and desire for improvement to identify the classes and groups which will help your goals, so there's no escaping that level.
It would be accurate to say that self-directed improvement has a lot of failure modes that are hard to recognize from the inside -- human biases and all. Working with others in a shared environment with scientific ground rules ensures that your biases and their biases form a non intersecting set and you're left with the truth.
I work in open source and it is very often the case that someone new comes to the project with a gigantic, unreviewable pile of changes that they want merged. Almost inevitably, it is 90% bad changes on top of 10% of innovation, and t... (read more)