College courses versus LessWrong

LessWrong is presented in appealing chunks that leave you feeling like you've gained a lot of insight, but in the end I find I gained much less than I felt like I was gaining at the time. I've learned some nice catchy phrases for certain cognitive biases and failure modes, and I've been entertained for many hours, but in terms of practical results I can think of few college classes that provided less value than LessWrong.

It's easy to feel like you've thoroughly understood whatever you've just read, but then find yourself unable to apply it. (This is a particular hazard with math.) Reading LessWrong (or anything else without exercises) systematically will not help you there, whereas almost any college class will require you to apply your knowledge to something or other. Even the most useless humanities classes (cough intro philosophy cough) I've taken have at least helped keep me in practice stringing words together into a coherent argument.

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.

Yes, being active on Lesswrong is probably superior to most undergraduate classes in philosophy. But this isn't Lesswrong specific. Seeking knowledge on your own is almost always better than taking knowledge from a teacher.

Do you feel, for instance, that LessWrong provided you with more valuable human capital than your introductory general chemistry sequence?

No, not even a little bit. Lesswrong's strength is philosophy, and unfortunately philosophy doesn't generate much human capital unless you're in some very specific fields. Lesswrong might have sharpened my philosophy skills from 90% to 95%, but really the average scientist only needs a philosophy skill level of 70% to be effective, to say nothing of other professions. And you've got to be at least at philosophy 75% to even start reading a lot of the material here - I don't think it's accessible to, say, your average redditor.

Human capital comes primarily from knowing facts and having skills.

That said, reading primary literature on my own contributed vastly more than my coursework contributed, in terms of facts. Coursework did sometimes fill in some parts I might not have taken interest in on my own - but simply talking to other scientists would have fulfilled the same function.

Knowledge which is systematically fed to you is not customized to your interests, is not customized to your abilities, and it's not customized to your intelligence. It shouldn't be surprising that sources of knowledge you've discovered on your own are superior to those which have been given to you.

For the demographic who can learn theory on their own,, school is for degrees, making connections, and hands-on experiences - not learning theory.

One thing courses are good for is learning things that are boring. It's easier to sit down and grind homework problems when you have an exam coming up than if you're on no schedule at all.

The hazard for autodidacticism is not being aware of what you've missed: you don't know what you don't know.

What about comparing LessWrong with an undergraduate "intro to philosophy" class?

I would describe the body of philosophy classes I took in college as far lesser in worth compared to reading the contents of Less Wrong, but with the caveat that if I had been in a position where an "intro to philosophy class" was teaching me much that I didn't already know, it's likely that I wouldn't have been ready to start absorbing the contents of Less Wrong.

Nobody who knows what they're talking about would ever suggest going to college for the purpose of getting an education. We have the Internet for that. If you need structure in your life (e.g., forced to wake up early 5x/week), or you need motivation (e.g., want to learn math but keep procrastinating), or something like that, and a degree would help you out (e.g., because you're young and you're looking for an entry-level position in a particular industry), then by all means, go to college. But if you just want to learn, then you're wasting your time.

Think about it this way. Not even getting into the messed up incentive structure of the university system, just consider how random your professors are. You're confined to a particular university in a particular location. On the Internet, on the other hand, you can go wherever you want, and find the particular niche community you need for what you're working on. And with this, we come to a more direct answer to your question: Reading Less Wrong would probably be much more useful than taking whatever college course you would end up in on the subjects most relevant here (basic epistemology, etc), but if you want to start learning math or physics for example, then Less Wrong wouldn't be of much use, and instead you'd want to for example check out Amazon for textbook reviews, and then head on over to a good forum on the topic (Physics Forums, perhaps?).

Perhaps relevant to this thread: I wrote up a sequence on decision analysis which parellels the semester-long graduate course on decision analysis I took fairly closely.

I do think reading the sequences is a decent at creating an intellectual foundation that works, which is what most students probably want out of an introduction to philosophy class, but most introduction to philosophy classes train students to recognize historical philosophical positions, which reading the sequences does not do.

I'm finding it difficult to compare LW to math/physics/compsci classes I've taken, with the exception of probability classes, where I think I've gotten more from working through the math than discussing Bayesianism. I think I've enjoyed time on LW more than any of the 'soft' classes I've taken, with perhaps one exception (a class entitled Alternatives to Violence taught by Colman McCarthy).

I imagine that reading LW might represent more knowledge than a business degree, but by "reading LW" I mean both reading LW and reading LW recommended books, like The Personal MBA (whose author posts here) and recommendations from this thread. (Implicit here is that part of reading LW and being active on LW is following the trails you find on LW; I think much of the value that gwern adds to LW is done on his personal site, and Yvain posts mostly offsite these days, and so on. LW seems good at sorting information, which is a rather valuable service.)

It may be that the benefit of LessWrong skews towards autodidacts -- after all, EY himself famously is self-taught. With that said, I'd say hell yeah a studious reading of LessWrong can teach you more than a "typical core college class." Sorry to say a typical core college class is far less than it should be. There are a few excellent teachers of core classes out there, but the academic system just is not set up to provide proper incentives for introductory undergraduate teaching.

I'd agree with your exception for technical classes such as general chemistry, not closely related to the core mission of LessWrong. However, if you choose to get involved in computer science related discussions on this forum, you had better punch your weight.

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).

Aha, mastery is the question, isn't it? I have no full answer for that. I hope some other LessWrongers will have.

With that said, the stupid questions forum is potentially better for specific questions than you could get from most graduate student tutors.

It might help if we had any idea what kind of "human capital" the OP is trying to build here. Rigorous thought? Writing practice? Useful knowledge? Knowledge with which to impress others?

I'm a computer science student. I did a course on information theory, and I'm currently doing a course on Universal AI (taught by Marcus Hutter himself!). I've found both of these courses far easier as a result of already having a strong intuition for the topics, thanks to seeing them discussed on LW in a qualitative way.

For example, Bayes' theorem, Shannon entropy, Kolmogorov complexity, sequential decision theory, and AIXI are all topics which I feel I've understood far better thanks to reading LW.

LW also inspired me to read a lot of philosophy. AFAICT, I know about as much philosophy as a second or third year philosophy student at my university, and I'm better at thinking about it than most of them are, thanks to the fantastic experience of reading and participating in discussion here. So that counts as useful.

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).

There has been at least one comment and at least one post on it before, so it appears there is active interest.

Would such a college course be possible to design in principle? How would such a college course compare with core requirements for undergraduates today?

Yes. See also Course recommendations for Friendliness researchers, Help Reform A Philosophy Curriculum and Train Philosophers with Pearl and Kahneman, not Plato and Kant.