[ShadowBlades512]

I think this is very correct for studying, when I was in undergrad, if I saw the answer, I found it was more effective to skip past it and solve it later. Even more important, once I am done, I should not go look at the answer to confirm if I am right or wrong, I should try and validate the answer by looking at my solution and trying to figure out if my solution is correct or not because there are plenty of ways to "disqualify" an answer, once I learned to do this well, my grades really went up.

However, I don't always agree with the fact that we don't have the answer in front of us in many situations. There are a lot of situations beyond grade school and undergrad where you do have the answer in front of you. Sometimes it's in for form of Numpy or Matlab or Simulink. It might be someone's research publication. Replicating these by working both forwards and backwards from their libraries or results can be much more effective.

[LeonB]

Good point about disproving your answer (before seeing the alleged real answer). The ability to quickly verify/disprove the answer is a separate and useful skill all by itself, that isn’t explicitly taught.

Troubleshooting/problem solving, working backwards from symptom to problem etc — that’s another, richer and very rewarding “real world” type of skill that isn’t directly taught, (though often encountered incidentally).

[wongarsu]

Half of modern mathematics is basically assuming something is true and then trying to work forwards and backwards to show that it is true. But that requires a lot of rigor. If you hand-wave a single step you are just exercising an advanced version of confirmation bias. Working forwards and sanity checking your result is a lot more forgiving.

[adrianN]

Guessing something and then confirming it is completely different from knowing the answer and then working towards it, especially for the kinds of problems that students solve in school. For the kind of proofs that working research mathematicians produce the hard part is not assuming that a Lemma is true, but already coming up with the correct definitions to formulate the Lemma in the first place is a delicate task.