[hmigneron]

To me, this is mostly about the way we learn as beginners.

You start as a beginner by reading books, watching experts, taking a class. Even if you start by jumping in and figuring it out, you still get the notion of how you should do it from somewhere. Because there is too much theory to understand at first (be it music, computing or math), you accept dogmas, or theorems or theories and work with them.

Eventually you gain enough confidence to reconsider what you have been taught. When you do come full circle, I think it's mostly because you understand why something is taught the way it is, not necessarily because you were instinctively doing it right at first.

[rquantz]

I think the process of becoming an expert at something has a lot to do with building your own model for how it works -- producing your own set of assumptions. This certainly can take the form of eventually returning to the assumptions you were initially taught, but that middle stage of questioning and disassembling can just as easily lead to different assumptions altogether.