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.
Compared to many of the people reading this, I've not participated extensively on LessWrong. In fact, I created my account only about a week ago. That said, I have read many LessWrong articles by contributors such as Eliezer, Jonah, Yvain, Gwern, and many others (if I missed you, my apologies). I wouldn't say it was a huge transformative experience. But I have probably learned a bit more from LessWrong than I learned sitting in on a class by Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker on human capital (without formally registering for the class or doing the coursework). I've learned more of value from LessWrong than all the MIT OpenCourseWare lectures I've consumed. There are a few online experiences, such as reading EconLog, that have been more educational for me than LessWrong, but I can count these on the fingers of one hand.
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. Do you feel, for instance, that LessWrong provided you with more valuable human capital than your introductory general chemistry sequence? What about comparing LessWrong with an undergraduate "intro to philosophy" class? Or an undergraduate intro class on the history of economic thought? At what percentile would you rank LessWrong relative to your college classes?
A second related question is whether there's a possibility of building a college course -- or college-like course, perhaps a MOOC -- specifically revolving around mastery of the content in LessWrong (perhaps starting with the Sequences). Would such a college course be possible to design in principle? How would such a college course compare with core requirements for undergraduates today?