[KhoomeiK]

Yup yup yup. I've been coming to this realization about myself so much recently too. It's how I taught myself web/app dev with hackathons, facing a huge project head-on and "backtracking" to learn stuff as needed. It's how I taught myself machine learning by jumping into a research project with a prof without ever having written PyTorch. And it's how I'm now teaching myself higher math, having just jumped into the homotopy type theory textbook and an idea I have for application in NLP, and going backwards to learn the required category theory and algebraic topology.

I wonder whether the fundamental structure of curricula could be changed to take advantage of this fact, because I think it's true for a lot of people.