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I think ordering of exposure makes a difference. Being submersed in prior art and then trying to come up with something novel is much harder or less likely than having conviction around a novel idea/experience and then digging into prior art to strengthen your offering.

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Uh that's entirely wrong. If you don't even know the tools available to the state-of-the-art, then how can you begin to build new things?

For example, in cryptography, if you don't know know about basic things like elliptic curves and hash functions, how are you going to solve any big problem?

Bitcoin is probably an example of this. I really doubt its creator knew about the state of the art in the field, yet he still created the state of the art in the field.

But yes, you are unlikely to do state of the art math without extensive education. However most other fields aren't like that, software engineering included.

But doesn't that seem like a strategy for indulging in confirmation bias?

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