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It isn’t necessarily “wasted” time. There are more ways to look at it, as well as 2nd order and 3rd order effects (and so on).

It’s a powerful skill to be able to try to solve things from first principles. And it’s a muscle you can strengthen.

It would be a bit silly to never look anything up, but it isn’t so black and white.

You need to be able to do both.

Only reading the existing literature is not good enough.

The capacity to create ideas is also something that needs to be practiced.

This is a good example of how the most obvious intuition can be wrong, or at best incomplete.