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The risk with this is that you spend 10 hours learning statistics then get demotivated and never do the other 190 hours to get to the good stuff. Then quickly you forget the 10 hours of stats you learnt too as it's irrelevant and you don't use it.

For me, playing with things and doing cool & fun stuff is always the way to get deeper into something.

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> Then quickly you forget the 10 hours of stats you learnt too as it's irrelevant and you don't use it.

Stats is one of a very small number of college courses that I took where I came away thinking "this should be mandatory for all voting adults". I use that stats course way more often than I use even algebra, just to be a functional adult in a world where bad statistics are used day in and day out to manipulate and deceive people into buying things or voting for someone.

So, I have to disagree: not only is a basic foundation in stats essential for understanding ML, it's something everyone really should have under their belt anyway to live in the modern world without turning into someone else's pawn.

Where did you do your stats course? Who taught it? What was the textbook? Asking because it sounds like your experience taking stats was a lot better than mine and I wonder if I could learn some more if I studied it again in a way more similar to what you did.

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