Train hard and improve your skills, or stop training and forget your skills. Training just enough to maintain your level is the worst idea.
You reinforce your biases, which makes it harder to resume improvement later. Also, you get comfortable with being at a fixed level.
Gaining knowledge is almost always good, but one must be wary of learning skills.
Knowledge tends to come in small chunks. If a chunk turns out to be wrong, you can discard it. Skills are harder to discard, and they’re always at least somewhat wrong.
If it’s ever more efficient to maintain proficiency by occasional practice (as it is with memory of facts—c.f. spaced reptition), than it is to forget but later quickly re-learn, then that seems worth the minor risk you’re afraid of. Especially if the skill is one that’s useful to have ready, or to regular employ.
Train hard and improve your skills, or stop training and forget your skills. Training just enough to maintain your level is the worst idea.
You reinforce your biases, which makes it harder to resume improvement later. Also, you get comfortable with being at a fixed level.
Also, there’s usually not a good reason to stop at a particular level of skill. If the skill is worth having at all, it’s probably going to be worth having at the highest level you can achieve, and if it’s not worth having, continuing to train to keep the same level at it is probably a manifestation of the sunk cost fallacy.
What do those two mean?
You reinforce your biases, which makes it harder to resume improvement later. Also, you get comfortable with being at a fixed level.
Knowledge tends to come in small chunks. If a chunk turns out to be wrong, you can discard it. Skills are harder to discard, and they’re always at least somewhat wrong.
If it’s ever more efficient to maintain proficiency by occasional practice (as it is with memory of facts—c.f. spaced reptition), than it is to forget but later quickly re-learn, then that seems worth the minor risk you’re afraid of. Especially if the skill is one that’s useful to have ready, or to regular employ.
Also, there’s usually not a good reason to stop at a particular level of skill. If the skill is worth having at all, it’s probably going to be worth having at the highest level you can achieve, and if it’s not worth having, continuing to train to keep the same level at it is probably a manifestation of the sunk cost fallacy.