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.
Oh, okay.
The way you were talking about "self-improvement" and how this has harmed the general atmosphere on LW and such, I thought you were talking specifically about how to improve in "LW rationality kind of thing", for which there aren't any classes (except in some narrow sense like a cognitive bias course as part of a psychology curriculum or something). I assumed it was obvious that if you want to learn a standard skill for which there is already an established teaching method, then just go benefit from the standard teaching method. But upon a re-read I guess this was a misinterpretation.
I'm skeptical about learning LW rationality as well. HPMOR does a great job of selling it, but for practical purposes (i.e. becoming more attractive or more employable) it loses out to object-level classes.