Do you honestly think that talking on a forum about philosophy, interpretations of quantum mechanics, and psychology is comparable to reading through, say, Apostol and doing all the exercises?
That's not a valid comparison. That would be like asking whether practicing your tennis serve on a regular basis would be comparable to joining a basketball team that meets 3x/week for 2 hours. Depends entirely on your goals and level of motivation. Just as someone may pick one or the other depending on what they value, someone may be better served spending time on LW than using that textbook, or vice versa.
And for that matter OP was discussing systematic reading, not active participation in discussions.
Well then we should probably suggest he change his plan from "systematically read the Sequences" to "do that and then participate on the forum". The former would be like showing up to class but never doing the homework. Whatever his wording, his point still stands. Rather than quibble about this, why not just get back to the point, which is whether Less Wrong is more useful than college?
Furthermore, in college you have people (TAs, not professors. Turns out office hours are where the learning is supposed to happen.) who are actually paid to look over your work and figure out exactly where you've gotten confused and then explain it to you in a way you'll understand.
Plenty of people will do this for free on Physics Forums, Less Wrong, or anywhere else. But again, it depends on the subject. If you want to learn math as it's usually taught, then yeah, college is probably a great place to be. But epistemology or philosophy? Less Wrong is clearly a better option.
Here you have a bunch of (reasonably smart, yes) people who come for interesting discussion because they're bored, and who may or may not feel like helping you understand where you've gone wrong.
Gone wrong on what? If math, then yeah, go to college! But if you want to refine your epistemological grounding or something like that, spend plenty of time on here, even act provocative if need be, and you'll get more criticism than you could ever ask for. How is this even in contention?
Participating in a forum is not bad as writing practice, I'll admit, but a lot of three-paragraph posts don't take nearly as much work (and I think don't do nearly as much good) as a few five-page papers.
Depends what mood you're in. This post I'm writing right now isn't very high quality writing, because it doesn't need to be, or because I don't have time to polish it up, or because this topic isn't important enough for that. But I've written plenty of posts on here that were crafted to be good writing, and it was better practice than anything you could have in college. In those instances, I was trying to convince a highly academic, potentially hostile audience (people on here). In college you're just trying to impress a professor, who may or may not be totally exhausted by the time he gets to your paper, and may or may not care at all. Read 2,000 pages of useless writing, and see if you still have the capacity to care about correcting the work in a thoughtful way, especially since you have no real incentive to reveal the holes in the reasoning like you would in an intense discussion with peers.
Simply put, the hoop you're jumping through with papers is to impress a professor who doesn't care about your ideas, wheres the test when you're posting on LW is to get the people on here to think you're being insightful. The best you can get from a professor is usually just that they think you're an intelligent student. The best you can get on here is for people to think you're really adding to their understanding. The former is susceptible of easy-to-fake signaling games and useless bullshit writing. The second is real communication.
Papers aren't real communication. They're just a signaling game. Forum posts are actual discussion.
I do not claim that colleges have more to offer than writing practice (with highly variable bullshit tolerance---if you talk to people who've taken the classes you're looking at, you can probably find some humanities professors who do have high standards, but I suppose this criterion takes us far away from the "typical" course) on every subject. If the OP has a specific interest in philosophical questions of the kind LW pays a lot of attention to and college courses do not, then he will get more value even from reading the sequences without discu...
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?