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 discussing them than he will from a college philosophy course. His request for comparisons to very different subjects like chemistry, though, suggested to me that he just wants to learn interesting things and practice "how to think."
It is my opinion that taking a few math classes will do a lot more to teach rigorous thought than would typical LW participation, and that the exercises in a freshman text like Apostol are a better kind of exercise than forum participation. I should probably have stuck to that rather than trying to defend the humanities.
I see what you're saying. I mean I guess the best answer might be that doing both would be best. I mean, Less Wrong came about in a culture where most people go to college. It seems expected that Less Wrong would fill in the gaps from a typical college education, and correct widespread problems in thinking, rather than being a wholesale replacement for a good college education.
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?