But if you are provided the answer, you can work backwards to figure out the technique. There is a large contingent here on HN that learned electronics by taking things apart, not by reading linearly through textbooks.
Test your theory on something that requires quite a few years of intuition building and understanding.
From my days as an MLE: Why does stochastic gradient descent, work?
From that question, you know the answer - it works! Great, now why should I believe you? I.e, prove it.
The knowledge to answer that question only really requires some understanding of stochastic processes, randomness, and vector calculus. But you would be pressed to get an answer like I did out of numerous people who did ML research and put things into all the types of conferences, and these people were not dumb at all, yet all of them used SGD in some form without really getting into why it works, effectively they do not get the tools they're using.