[yt-sdb]

I don't think so. My problem was that I had a weak grasp of many basics concepts, and more critically I did not know in which areas I was weak. So while it's easy ex post to say "I could skip such and such section", it would have been impossible to make this judgment ex ante.

And in fact, I think a failure mode many people make is trying to predict which things they already know and then skipping those. This allows for blind spots to persist.

I suppose the one way to skip things correctly would be to have a coach. But that comes at a new cost ($), but maybe that works for some people.

[hawk_]

I have been seeing more and more usage of 'ex post' and 'ex ante' lately. What do they convey that isn't conveyed by 'after' and 'before'?

[yt-sdb]

"Before" and "after" are generic terms. A car might stop before the crosswalk (space). You might eat dinner after work (time). But "ex ante" and "ex post" specify a relationship to an (random) event or to specific information. For example, a data scientist might compute a quantity "ex ante". This means that the quantity was estimated using only forecast data. No historical data was used. It would not make sense, however, to say that a car stops ex ante the crosswalk.

I could have easily said "afterwards" and "beforehand", but I like "ex post" and "ex ante" when referring to before/after having access to specific information.

[timidiceball]

it conveys that you know what ex post and ex ante mean