Maybe this is true for some topics. Yeah, a lot of times you can pick up a new programming language by playing around with it. I don't think most people will ha

Maybe this is true for some topics. Yeah, a lot of times you can pick up a new programming language by playing around with it. I don't think most people will have much luck learning say, advanced mathematics by just futzing around and skimming Wikipedia though. Even topics like ML (an example referenced by the original post) benefit greatly from an understanding of theory and fundamentals. Yeah maybe any random dev can hack together a model by downloading scikit-learn and throwing data at it, but you'll probably get much better results if you take the time to learn about concepts like cross-validation, overfitting, etc. The "just do stuff" attitude has its merits, but there's also something to be said for working from first principles and learning some theory to back up your applied skills.