Some of my friends have claimed that reading LessWrong systematically (and perhaps participating in the comments and attempting to write posts) would generate more value for an undergraduate than a typical core college class (with the possible exception of technical classes specific to the person's major or area of specialization). I'm curious about whether readers agree with this assessment

I was going to say "yes", but after doing some back-of-the-envelope math, I'm no longer so sure.

A typical five-credit undergraduate course represents five hours of lectures a week for ten weeks (eleven- or twelve-week courses were typical at my school, but some time is lost on exams and other non-transmissive content), plus maybe the same time again in homework and self-study. So let's call it a hundred hours of work.

The mean Less Wrong user, according to the 2012 poll, spends about twenty minutes a day on the site. Assuming we trust that and that we equate a year of participation with "systematic reading" by your friends' standards, we're looking at a threshold of about a hundred and twenty hours: definitely on the same order time-wise.

For LW to be more valuable than an average undergraduate course, then, it would either have to be more efficient at transmitting information, or transmitting much more valuable information. I find myself very skeptical of the former. The latter seems slightly more plausible, but while LW seems intuitively more useful per unit content than five credits of underwater basket-weaving, I'm not willing to rank it over, say, Data Structures or Chemistry 1A.

On the other hand, LW participation may lead to instrumentally valuable lifestyle or philosophy shifts -- but that's a lot harder to estimate than direct transmission of knowledge.