Hi!

New here. I wanted to share a project I have started, the Sherlockian Abduction Master List, aiming to collect in one place many observable details that allow Sherlock Holmes style inferences (I would call them abductions not deductions). My basic idea is that the reason no one has attained Holmes level insight is not so much a lack of sufficient fluid intelligence but a lack of lived experience. We just don't have time in our lives to try every career and vocation, and we can't be born into every culture - and the identifiable hints to a person's background are hard to discover without firsthand experience. I am trying to change that by crowdsourcing an exhaustive and tested list with images and sources.

If you are aware of something like this that already exists, please let me know! Certainly there are a lot of deduction blogs focused on memory reasoning etc. (such as mentat training plan) which is great, but I am trying to collect specific cues not general advice of that type.

Otherwise, please add your ideas by commenting below or at the link above. You can also join the sherlockian-abduction google group I am starting if you're interested in further discussion (or email me and I'll invite you: colewyeth at gmail dot com). Also, it would be great if you shared this with anyone you think might like it, from as diverse a set of backgrounds as possible - I want as much content as I can get!

Thanks!

p.s. This is cross-posted from r/scienceofdeduction which seems to larger and more focused on deducing things from photos, hopefully you aren't seeing it twice :) out of curiosity what is the connection between the two subreddits?

AKA information. Where do you guys learn new info when it's time to refresh your knowledge? Apart from real life, it is.

There are lots of hints, just one thing that might help you: I’m a 13 yo male. If you need to see anything closer just ask in comments for a photo

How to know how long since a person showered from their hair ?

Due to the lack of guides in deduction , i decided to start a blog staring the mindset to deduction , different technique in deduction , observation and other aspects of deduction While answering question and even learning new things together After all the science of deduction is ab endeavor which life is not long enough to allow any mortal to attain its highest level of mastery So we are all scholars in deduction

https://www.tumblr.com/deductionscholar?source=share

This is a Reddit-friendly transcript of a post in one of my main blogs focused on Deduction, you can find links to the post here, the links to my blogs here: Studies in the Art of Deduction and Amateur Deductions

So Christmas is right around the corner, and generally this means it's gift giving season, and while i've been very busy (as you can tell from having only posted Deduction tips for a few weeks now, and yes, i've seen the questions i've been sent, stay tuned for the answers tomorrow!) i thought i'd take a moment to write a post that's gonna be particularly useful around this time of the year. Let's learn how to deduce presents!

First things first, what are we looking for when deducing presents? Well we want to gather as much information as possible about what's inside the box, without actually seeing it, so there's a few things we can immediately focus on:

Size and Weight

Let's start with the obvious, the box the present comes in immediately lets us know the maximum size of the object inside. This might seem almost useless but we're gonna need all the information we can get, since we'll be trying to narrow down all the possible things that could be inside the box as much as we can. Weight is another important factor, it narrows down the possibilities a lot more, we immediately get a sense of generally what type of object we're dealing with, and it's the first thing we should notice when we pick up the present, which we absolutely must do, we're gonna be fiddling around with it a lot

Give it a Shake

I mean it, give the present a little shake, gently, we don't wanna break whatever's in there, but we're looking for 2 things:

1. Movement: Think about it, these presents don't just appear under the christmas tree, they're shipped here somehow, on a plane, a truck, maybe in a car, where it'll experience turbulence, sudden breaks, shifting, moving. So if whatever's inside the box can't move freely we know it was packaged to withstand movement, which means it can break. The more densely packed something is the more they're trying to protect it, so, does it move freely in the box? is it sturdy enough to be packaged freely? or is it fragile and requires bubblewrap or similar protection? this makes the difference between something like jewlery, glass objects, or electronics, vs. clothes, accessories like wallets, or maybe even some books
2. Sounds: What does it sound like when you shake it? is it hollow? does it clank like metal? does it collide with anything else in the box? maybe it's not even one thing, maybe there's two or three items in there, how many collisions are there? this gives you an idea of material, density, amount of objects, size relative to the box (remember, there's no reason the item can't be significantly smaller than the box it comes in)

Rotate it

If the object is loose inside the box, shift it to a corner of the box and rotate it. This gives you an idea of shape, a square or box shaped object (like another box or a book) will remain against the corner and either fit into it or be held by its own corners until the tilt is too much, at which point it'll firmly rotate along with the box. You can count the amount of sides it potentially has this way and maybe even get a better idea of its size. An object with anything other than 4 sides will roll around the sides of the box that contains it as you rotate it

Know the Person

This is probably the most important point in here. Keep in mind you're not constrained to what's inside the box, chances are you know who's giving this gift to whom, so what's the person giving the gift like? what's their relationship with the reciever? what's their budget? what do they know about the person they're getting a gift from? and how much do they care? all of these are important things to know cause they give you context, someone with a low budget won't buy a new macbook for someone else, someone who doesn't know the recipient much will probably stick to generic gifts, maybe even gift cards, and someone who's very artistic and cares a lot might make a gift for the recipient, something handmade. Context is the most important part of this process

All the information you can get from all of these sources put together can paint a picture that's good enough to eliminate a lot of possibilities, and then with the context you have, and the pool of possible gifts you've mentally mapped out, you can make a pretty educated guess of which item is the most likely one to be contained in this box. This is a very fun exercise to do during the holidays, or really any time presents are involved, i like to keep a record of how many i guess correctly, and using all of this i have about a 70% success rate. Feel free to mess around with the gift in some other ways, see what other information you can extract from the present before opening it. Also keep in mind a lot of this advice assumes the present is inside a box, but variations of all of this can be applied to any format of gifts

So go forth and deduce all those presents, not only yours, try to deduce what others are getting too

Merry Christmas and Happy Observing!

-DV

This is a Reddit-friendly transcript of a post in one of my main blogs focused on Deduction, you can find links to the post here, the links to my blogs here: Studies in the Art of Deduction and Amateur Deductions

Objective: recognize the existence of different products based on smell, and potentially recognize what products these are

Details: For this exercise you're gonna need to go out on a walk. Find a busy place, the streets of a city or town, a mall, something like that. Make sure it's not a park, or some place where people don't walk past each other ofter, since this is what you're looking for. You're gonna want to walk past people often while doing this exercise, as you do, try to focus on smells. Your goal is to point out as many "unnatural" smells as you can, anything coming from perfumes, shampoos, soaps, conditioners, colognes, etc.

You're looking to be able to recognize how many people you walk past are wearing any of these products. If a group walks by, try to recognize if some of them are wearing these and some aren't, if so which ones? make quick small mental notes on it.

This is an exercise about being able to point out the existence of these products, in order to train you to be on the lookout for them. That being said, you get bonus points if you're able to recognize the specific brands of these products by smell, or recognize if two or more people who walked past you have been wearing the same product, or (and this one's hard), if you're able to recognize how many of these products someone's wearing (so, is the smell coming from just one product? is it the conditioner and the perfume? is the smell a combination of 3 different products? you get the idea)

Go give it a shot

Happy Observing!

-DV

This is a Reddit-friendly transcript of a post in one of my main blogs focused on Deduction, you can find links to the post here, the links to my blogs here: Studies in the Art of Deduction and Amateur Deductions

Alright this is gonna be one of the posts that people seem to like, probably because of the dramatic title and the "hot take" as the kids are calling it these days. This time we're talking about practice, specifically about one of the biggest mistakes i've seen people make with their practice habits

Now from the title you can already tell what i'm talking about, you have got to stop practicing with pictures, at least as much as you probably do compared to practice with irl subjects, this is for one simple reason: pictures are not real life!

Now, the argument of "anyone who posts a picture being very aware of at least vaguely what they're posting and hence your deductions are already being at least partially conditioned" is a very old one, and while actually a good one and one to keep in mind, that's not where i'm going with this

When i say pictures aren't real life i'm talking about the fact that pictures dictate the information we can get, not because of the people posting these pictures, but rather because of the nature of the pictures themselves. Any photos we find have the disadvantage of not allowing for deductions that would be useful or relevant at all in real life

Think about the following situation: you find a picture of someone's hand posted in r/deduction or somewhere similar, and you think "awesome! a fun, challenging picture that doesn't seem too stressful to deduce!" and you start going at it:

• You see hairbands on the wrist, so they have long hair
• You see nail polish and signs of manicure, so statistically they're probably female presenting
• You see the hand is actually quite small, so they're short
• You see the skin suggests they're young, maybe late teens/early 20s
• You see they're wearing expensive jewlery, so well off economically
• You see they're wearing an apple watch, so they have an iphone and potentially other apple devices

These are all good deductions, actually some of them could lead you to some deeper, more interesting conclussions, so all good right? Well let's now say you see this same person (with the same hand, hopefully) walking down the street, how many of those deductions are now just observations at most? The hair being long you can just see, same thing with the height and probably gender they present as, the age isn't much of a deduction either anymore, at most you could maybe narrow it down as a deduction but you can just see the range they probably fall in. You're left with maybe 2 deductions that are actually worth anything

Now yes, this is just an example, and yes i made it up, of course not all practice with pictures is useless, and not all ways of practicing with pictures are unproductive. But my point is this: a lot of people, most people i've met in this community actually, realize that it's a lot easier to just pull up your computer, find some pictures to deduce, and boom practice, not realising that most of their time an effort is probably going down the drain. And then those same people go out into the world, ready to deduce, ready to sit in a public setting and put all their practice to good use, and find that they can't actually deduce anything, or worse, they don't realise (and have no one to tell them) that hey, that deduction about that girl that just walked by having long hair because of the hairband on her wrist, yeah that's not really much of a deduction, everyone can see she has long hair.

So my advice is this: for the love of god, no matter how much you practice online, with pictures of people, keys, phones, daily carry, and rooms (jesus please don't practice only with rooms, when's the last time you actually saw someone's bedroom irl?). Do not make that your primary form of practice, go out, practice in real life scenarios, in coffee shops, and classrooms, and restaurants, watch real people exist in their natural habitat, and try to maximize your deduction abilities there, this is where most of your life is gonna be spent, and where most of your deductive abilities will matter

And apart from all of this, i'll throw in some extra advice: Practice mindfully, know why you're doing the exercises you're doing, know why and how certain types of practice work and if they're actually helping you. If you're gonna practice with pictures be aware that your goal is not to be able to use all of the types of deductions you manage to pull off with a picture in real life, but rather to strengthen your reasoning capabilities to then use those in real life, and reach different, more complex conclusions with them. Pictures are not a supplement for real life, they're a training range to make you sharper, but if you only ever go to a shooting range that doesn't mean you can suddenly join the army with no other training

That's all for this post, see you next weekend... or maybe sooner? ;)

Happy Observing!

-DV

This is a Reddit-friendly transcript of a post in one of my main blogs focused on Deduction, you can find links to the post here, the links to my blogs here: Studies in the Art of Deduction and Amateur Deductions

Objective: Deduce, or at least observe, as much as you can about strangers while having very limited time to gather information

Details: For this exercise you'll have to methodically choose your vantage point for observing. Find a place where you can sit and watch people walk by, not a park bench or a place where you can see them fade away into the distance, but something like the window of a bar or a cafe, where the stranger will pass by and you'll only have the time they take to be blocked by a wall or some other obstacle to observe. Now use this time constraint to deduce, or at least observe, as much as you can about each passerby, for bonus points bring a little notebook or paper with you, and note down how many clear deductions or observations you made in the time you had to look at them, try to make that number as high as possible.

The point of this exercise is very simple: To train your speed when it comes to reaching conclusions and making observations. The quicker you can get through the initial stages of deduction, the quicker you can get going on the deeper, more complex parts of it in the moment, and the more you can take advantage of your skills in real time

Now go have fun with it.

Happy Observing!

-DV

This is a Reddit-friendly transcript of a post in one of my main blogs focused on Deduction, you can find links to the post here, the links to my blogs here: Studies in the Art of Deduction and Amateur Deductions

Okay so, been busy, most of my posts so far were written months ago and were scheduled to post while i was occupied, but now i'm back so let's have fun with a simple but insanely useful concept in deduction: Binaries!

So, the title is really self explanatory, a binary is just a word that refers to two things. In Biology a binary system is used as a base for the nomenclature of living things, each living being is classified into different categories based on the idea of "it either has X quality, or it doesn't", depending on the answer the creature either goes down one path or another, which might then branch off into another binary option of the same nature, or just establish a category the living thing fits into (a species for example). So how do we use this idea in deduction?

Well much like the variety of living creatures, the behaviors of people and the effects they have on their environment is massively extensive and very complex, and being able to reduce things to binary options can be very useful to navigate this big, tangled ball of options we usually run into when deducing. So how do we do it and how does it help?

Let's start with how it helps. There are many ways in which i teach to see deduction in your head, these are all meant to first and foremost give you an easy understanding of how deduction can work theoretically, and to allow you to use these mental constructs that represent deduction, as tools to pull out when actually deducing. For example, seeing deduction as a Building in your head (in reference to my Building Theory) allows you to understand the structure a deduction can take, but also gives you a tool and a reference to look back at when deducing so you can orient yourself and think "okay, how do i reach the next floor or the building?" or "should i just keep expanding on the base and focus on making a large first floor, or should i aim to have multiple floors? how easy is either option based on what i'm deducing?". In a similar manner, binaries will give you a good mental image of the structure of a deduction, and help you massively as a tool

So when actually employing binaries as a strategy when deducing you're aiming to make the chunk of your deductions that you're applying it to into a bit of a flowchart that looks something like this:

Diagramn

So the idea becomes, reducing every possibility in a deduction to two options, these options are usually (but not always) yes or no questions. So instead of looking for a person's hobbies, of which there could be many, you're aiming to narrow down the list by either proving they engage (or don't engage) in one specific hobby, or proving they engage (or don't engage) in one whole category of hobbies. So the question "what are this person's hobbies?" turns into "Does this person like to read?" or "does this person go out a lot?", both of these questions have two mutually exclusive answers, either yes or no, nothing in between. So now you want to look for proof of either of these answers, you're now not looking for what hobbies this person could possibly have, you're no longer on the lookout for anything that could possibly point towards some hobby, no matter how small of a clue it is, no matter how obscure of a hobby it points towards, you're now looking for things you know reading often (or not reading often) is accompanied by, or things you know indicate this person doesn't go out a lot, which would mean their hobbies are mostly indoors, which would eliminate a whole chunk of possibilities

Now for the nuances of this: I said the answers to these binaries are mutually exclusive, either one or the other, nothing in between, and yes that's sometimes true: people are either married or not married, people are either employed or unemployed, etc. But this is real life, and in real life things are rarely that simple.

Yes someone could be married and could exhibit all the signs of not being married (for example they could be looking to cheat, and simply doing a great job at hiding their existing marriage). Obviously the existence of in-between states destroy the idea of a binary option, it'd be great to think someone is either right or left handed, but oh oh, ambidextrous people exist.

So keep in mind that this is a tool that helps in the process of deduction, not a tool meant to build an entire deduction from scratch. Just because you used this tool and established that someone is an introvert doesn't mean you shouldn't subject that conclusion to a test to see if it stands, it also doesn't mean you should 100% stick to it because it's the only explanation to what you're observing. Maybe the person is an ambivert, maybe you're catching all the signs of an introvert because they've been cooped up at home for a couple of weeks and there's barely any sign of them going out, these are options that should be explored, and the way to explore them is through the use of all the other tools i give you and all the other skills you have in your repertoire as a deductionist.

In short, this tool doesn't outrank any other methods, it's simply a vehicle to help you hone in or discard possibilities. In the ambivert example, sure, you may not know if they're an introvert or an ambivert by using binaries, but you're sure as hell they're not an extrovert, which is very useful information

Now you may ask "how do i know what things come with someone not going out a lot, or with someone reading a lot? i haven't studied that, i don't know what signs to look for!" and to that i say, you don't have to study that, and yes you do know what signs to look for, it just takes a little imagination. I answered a question about this a few weeks back and i recommend reading it here, and i'll maybe make a post about it if people want it and if it would be useful to have separate from that ask, Try to employ the same startegy i describe in that answer any time you feel like you can't deduce something just because you haven't studied it enough, you'll be surprised how much you can deduce using simple, basic understanding of situations.

With that i'll leave you and go write the next post after this, as always if anyone has questions just hit me up, i answer all questions on Mondays

Happy Observing

-DV

https://www.themoderndeductionist.online

Good Evening fellow deductionists. Today I have some great news. For the past few weeks I have been working on a blog that focuses on Deduction in our modern era, therefore being called TheModernDeductionist, last sunday I wrote my first blog post and have been doing some final touches since then. My first post is now available for anyone to read, If you feel up to it feel free to check it out and give me any feedback, I am planning to make 2-3 posts a week with one of them being a interactive game in which I analyse a post from this or another reddit forum and the other ones being a mini essay or a contemplation. I am going to be replying to any questions and hope to see you soon, Cheers!

This is a Reddit-friendly transcript of a post in one of my main blogs focused on Deduction, you can find links to the post here, the links to my blogs here: Studies in the Art of Deduction and Amateur Deductions

Okay so, this blog is meant to be the place where i put a lot of my more fluid ideas, things like rants about a specific concept or theory in deduction, or posting some deduction that i made. I tend to use @amateur-deductions for more article-like posts explanations so here's a bit of a rant for you about what deductions can look and feel like.

So recently i've been answering questions about how to squeeze information out of the things you observe, how to break down what you see into information that can constitute as actual deductions. And while i was in that mindset to make one of my last posts, my Youtube feed blessed me with videos of Levy Rozman, (Gothamchess on youtube for those of you who don't know), and i've started to draw some parallels between chess and deduction.

Now, i'm by no means an amazing chess player, i've been more into it recently since i have time, but it's not really something i dedicate a lot of practice to. That being said, Levy said something in one of the videos i watched that caught my attention: As he was explaining very basic chess concepts, he mentioned how once you start pushing your pieces forward and entering the middle-game, the moves you make in the opening start tying together.

Essentially what he pointed out is that, once the opening is done, your pieces start to naturally intertwine with each other, they protect each other and take control of a plethora of squares, so many that sometimes you don't realize it until the game starts to develop more. You start to notice that the knights you moved in the opening can attack a certain way because the rooks that you also moved in the opening are conveniently in a position where they can cover the attacking pieces. Or you notice that as the opponent pushes pieces to attack you there's no reason to panic because a piece you'd moved during the opening is conveniently guarding the area the opponent is pushing into.

Now, you may be wondering what the hell does this have to do with deduction. Well in the same way that you don't always have to think about every single little implication about your moves during a chess opening, and even if you don't, you still can start formulating a plan in the middle-game with what you built during said opening, in deduction you're not necessarily always looking to make a "plan" from the beginning, or to set up your observations a specific way to get to a specific conclusion.

The way that deduction works a lot of the time is, you just start observing, maybe drawing small conclusions like someone's handedness or their extraversion level, and then as you start piling onto these conclusions you start to realise that a lot of them conveniently tie together, you start to notice that you can make forward progress because a new conclusion that you might consider happens to be supported by an observation or conclusion you made in the "opening". In the same way that, in chess, as you start to get into the middle-game you realize you can attack with certain pieces because other pieces are now set up in a way that can defend them. You're looking to realize that you can push forward in your conclusions because previous observations and simple deductions have been set up to defend these conclusions.

So taking a deduction from Sherlock for example. As you look at someone's phone and start to realize that it's expensive, and that it has an engraving and scratches, you start to draw small conclusions, like "huh, this is a gift because this person is clearly not in an economical position to buy this", or "huh, this has had a previous owner". This could be considered the "opening", you're sort of just going through each piece, developing it, getting control of the center of the board, and just scanning around for your next moves.

Once you have a solid footing, once you have a solid opening position, you start pushing forward, and start realizing that the pieces that you've set up can start moving and tying together, so you make a move that looks optimal with the piece set up (the information) that you have, something like "well if the phone was given to him by a previous owner, and that previous owner is a close family member, why not move in with them? hm, maybe they don't get along". And as the deduction goes on you try to keep making these optimal moves, moves that are supported with what you've already uncovered.

And like a chess game, yes, sometimes you blunder pieces, sometimes you reach a conclusion that isn't supported by any evidence, and it leads to you loosing the game. Sometimes you make a counting error and you realize that your pieces are not as protected as you though. Translating this from the example, sometimes you think every conclusion you're drawing makes sense and is fully supported, only to be corrected and realize that you didn't account for something, or that there was another, simpler explanation for what you've found, and this leads to loosing the game.

And when this happens the next move is to plug the chess game into an engine and see what you did wrong and what you did right, did you blunder anything? did you make a move that was horrible but the opponent didn't notice? did you miss a mate in one? or in 3? or in 5? In other words, did you reach the right conclusion with the wrong reasoning? or did you miss a clue that would have led you to a massive deduction? or did you just jump to a conclusion without a good base for it? As always the goal is to analyze this and make sure these are not mistakes you make in your next game

Here's where i'll leave this rant, i do hope it was informative (hopefully it wasn't confusing). If you have any questions feel free to send them over in my asks.

Happy Observing!

-DV

This is a Reddit-friendly transcript of a post in one of my main blogs focused on Deduction, you can find links to the post here, the links to my blogs here: Studies in the Art of Deduction and Amateur Deductions

Much like the Building Theory, the Timeline Theory serves as a tool to visualize, understand, and work with certain aspects of Deduction. In this case instead of focusing on the separation betwen deductions and observations, we focus on the fact that everything that happens that might leave some observable evidence can be placed in a timeline that goes only one way: forward. From the moment an event in someone's life occurs, it fits into a timeline, that event comes before something and after something, and learning to read an navigate this timeline is an important skill to have.

How To Make One

Let's imagine an individual, we'll call him John. John is a college student, on a given day he wakes up, takes a shower, goes through with his cleaning rituals, walks to the bus stop, and takes a bus to class. Now let's say we find John on campus, we've never seen or met him before, and we deduce him, what do we see? Well let's say we see some pen marks on his hands (maybe some chalk depending on the college's instalations), we might see some white stains on his clothes, some mud on his shoes, and if we pass him as we walk we might smell a mix of intense hygene products, and hints of a smell more prominent in public spaces. For the sake of this example let's also give some context and say it hasn't rained on campus in the past few days.

Now, you might be able to connect each of these observations to their source, or you might not, and that's okay, because what matters about this example is being able to recognize the order the observations are given in. If you notice, the observations are given all jumbled up, they don't correlate in any way to the order in which the events are described, this is important because it's exactly how observations are found in real life: Disorganized

So now that we have our observations we have to organize them chronologically while deducing. The product smell indicates a cleaning ritual, which is probably done in the morning, knowing a cleaning ritual happened means the white stains are probably toothpaste from brushing his teeth. The mud indicates walking somewhere where the the ground is wet, so at the point of this happening he's left his house, so it's after the cleaning ritual. The public space smell can be identified as the smell of the seats of the bus with some experience (Deduction by knowledge), and the pen marks suggest writing, probably done in class, so after the bus ride.

So now we have a timeline, (that i can only link as an Imgur post, ugh) it goes like this:

Timeline

Navigating Timelines

And now we have to realize that these events aren't the only ones that exist in this timeline, we just don't have the full list of events. This is when things get fun, our job at this point is to move back and forth in this timeline and fill in gaps, what happened in between the shower and the bus? did he eat breakfast? did he stop at a shop to buy something? did he lay in bed for a while because he wakes up way too early for the bus? It's our job to get our best Doctor Strange on, and rewind and fast forward this movie of John's day that we're creating, and fill in what happened in the limited amount of hours he's been awake.

That is the main use of visualizing events in a timeline we can navigate, but it's certainly not the only use. Everything in this timeline has an effect on everything else be it on something that you have in it already, or something you haven't added yet. Knowing John lives somewhere where it's rained recently and there's mud tells you how for away from college he may be, which tells you how long the bus ride he takes to college is. So if one day you notice the time he takes to get to college is noticeably longer than it should be then, there's something that happened that you're missing, something between leaving home and assisting class, now you know there's a hole in your timeline that you have to fill, and you can look for extra information to do so. Also by knowing how long different parts of the timeline take you can fill up other areas, like if you know this is all John has done since he woke up you can figure out the time at which he wakes up. this is a very simple example of how organizing this timeline can moving across it allows you to find more information, as well as make sense of the information you have

The most important thing to realize is that every event has a place in this timeline, and every point in the timeline gives you more information. Knowing this, your goal is to fill the timeline as much as possible.

Note that in this example the timeline is loosely representative of a morning, but you can have it represent whatever amount of time you want. Realize that, for example, there's a limited amount of hours in a day, so when deducing someone think about what their day looks like, you have 24 hours to fill, some are spent sleeping, some are spent eating, so what happens with the rest of the time, anything you fill up leaves less time for other activities, so slowly but surely you're getting information by reducing the amount of things this person could've done in a day. And you can apply this to any length of time, a day, two days, a week, a month, these are all limited amounts of time that you can fill up as you get information.

And that's it for this post, if you have any questions about the implementation of this theory or about any other deduction related topic, as always my inbox is open

Happy Observing!

-DV

So u/Alternative_Army_541 has a deduction website (I encourage you to go check it out!) and they reached out and asked me if they could interview me, I’m really excited for it, so if anyone has any questions they wanna send for the interview just contact them so they can add them to the list!

This is a Reddit-friendly transcript of a post in one of my main blogs focused on Deduction, you can find links to the post here, the links to my blogs here: Studies in the Art of Deduction and Amateur Deductions

This theory is one of the best ways i've found to understand the different stages of a deduction, it serves as a wonderful way to illustrate how much a deduction is a progressive process, with multiple little steps between observations and conclusions. It's also an amazing tool to analyze other people's deductions and break them down in a way that allows you to map out their trains of thought and learn from them.

The Theory

The core idea of the theory is to compare a deduction to a simple building. A building has a certain process to being constructed, you can’t start a building by making the roof, or the third floor, nor can you make an efficient one out of cardboard.

Similarly, in Deduction there's a certain order to the process, you can't start a deduction at the conclusion, or the middle of the reasoning stage, neither can you deduce anything without solid observations and data. In other words, "you can't make bricks without clay"

Beginning

A Deduction is built using the same principle, first we gather the materials, we gather data, observations, snippets of information we'll use to build our structure. Then out of these materials we build a foundation or a base for the building, and everything we deduce will ultimately be supported by this foundation, by these observations. Then we build the first floor on top of this base, this floor represents any deductions that rely directly on the observations that serve as a base (eg. phone on right pocket = right handed, as you can see there's no middle conclusion reached between these two points).

Upper Floors

Next we get onto the second floor, this one will be composed of any deductions we make that are based on the observations that make up the foundation, but also based on our previous, straightforward deductions that make up the first floor (eg. phone on right pocket -> right handed = They shoot a gun with their right hand, this conclusion rests on the shoulders of the observation and the very straight forward deduction that comes with it).

And so on and so forth we construct this building, each time getting further and further away from the observations we first made, and each time relying more and more on the stability of the prior deductions. For our building to be stable and not crumble at a slight shake, we need to make sure the materials we use are the best quality, so our observations must be well established, without assumptions or biases, and the deductions we make must be accurate, with sane trains of thought. And of course, the taller we make any building the easier it is for it to fall, so we have to make sure as we go higher, as we add more and more deductions that stray further from the observations, we make our building sturdier, making sure our deductions have less and less flaws in them.

Once we have experience we can start choosing what kind of building we want to make. A tall skyscraper with multiple levels to the deductions that intertwine with each other, or a simple 2 story building that relies on it's horizontal area, consisting of a large base made out of many observations, and only direct deductions from these.

Of Note

It's also important to note that the deductions from the first floor onwards always have to treat any deductions from previous floors as correct, we cannot deduce that someone would shoot a gun with their right hand if we don't treat our deduction that they're right handed as correct. Now this doesn't mean our deduction HAS to be correct, we can still be wrong about it, but in the moment of making deductions we have to assume we're right to push forward onto higher level deductions.

It's worth understanding that this theory serves as a way to visualize how far away a deduction is from the initial observation and how it connects to other deductions around it. This doesn't mean that just because a deduction is higher up in this building it's more complex. While distance from observations and complexity can be related, they're not the same measure, a "tall" building doesn't necessarily mean a more complicated one, and vise versa.

So with this in mind, i'm gonna end the post here, hope you liked it and if you have any questions feel free to drop them in my inbox

Happy Observing!

-DV

This is a Reddit-friendly transcript of a post in one of my main blogs focused on Deduction, you can find links to the post here, the links to my blogs here: Studies in the Art of Deduction and Amateur Deductions

So a while back i was asked how i break down information when deducing, you can see my answer to that question here. But since not long after that i was teaching deduction to a friend, and i had to get into this topic again, i thought i'd make a post out of it.

I'm gonna be linking this to another question i was asked a while ago, and that is "how do i see the world when deducing?", again, i give an answer to that here. But i think expanding on this answer, and linking it to the question at hand, may be useful for anyone wanting to learn deduction through watching other people do it, which is how most deductionists learn.

So the first thing we have to do when breaking down information from what we observe, is to keep in mind the implicit information that comes with those observations. So for example, let's say that we're deducing someone, and for some reason, the only thing we know about them is that they have car keys that belong to them, well that means that obviously they have a car, but some implicit information that comes with that is the following:

• The fact that they have the money to acquire a car, which tells us about their economical status
• They have money to pay for the gas for said car
• They have accessibility to go to a lot of places without having to rely on outside factors like public transportation
• The radius of places they can comfortably visit is quite large
• They drive places, which means that they at least shouldn't drink for the periods of time when they're driving
• They're at least 16-18 years old (depending on the country)

You can see how we go from knowing absolutely nothing about this made up individual, to knowing a few things, just by understading that the existence of car keys means the existence of a car, which means a plethora of other things. Now we can take one of these implicit meanings and expand on it, for example, their age being at least 16-18 means:

• They're probably close to or have graduated high school
• They're close to having or have a job
• They work or study somewhere within the previously mentioned radius
• They follow a daily route to get to where they work or study

And with that now we get an idea of location, routes they take, and travel times, and this is just with a single piece of information about them having car keys. Now if we were to know, for example, the model of the car, we could know more about their economical status, placing them as a student or knowing what kind of job they might have, which would give us a more accurate age range than just a minimum of 16-18. From this point on it's just a matter of stacking more and more information and relating it to what we already have, discarding things that don't match with the new observations we make, and adding new ideas based on the new information we acquire.

Now, in my blogs you're gonna be seeing a lot of different ways to visualize deduction, a lot of different theories that compare deduction to a Timeline or a Building to help illustrate certain parts of the skill. I think the closest i've gotten to describing it as a network of interconnected points has been my String Theory (yes, i know, super original name), but for purpose of this post we're gonna try to visualize deduction as a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff connections between observations, implicit meanings you can derive from said observations, and probable conclusions, conclusions that are derived by mixing and matching these things together.

For this purpose i've made a quick and simple illustration of what this could look like with different observations you could make. For this example i've worked simply with the existence of a theoretical phone, watch, and set of keys, but the more we go into detail the more our conclusions go from very general, to incredibly specific (for example knowing that the phone is old and scratched, or knowing that the car keys are of a certain brand of car, or that the watch is a gift. All of this gives us more information to add to this ever expanding web of simple conclusions). The diagram can be seen in the following link:

Diagram

So to explain this visual aid a bit, you can see how the objects are broken down into things that we know about them or their owner just from their existence. Knowing a watch is a smart watch means it has apps, it has connections to a phone, it can recieve texts or calls. Knowing keys are for some sort of gate means they open some closed off, private residence, or knowing they're for some sort of office tells us they're probably connected to some job, which means the person has an income, they go somewhere probably about 8 hours a day, they probably have to interact with people quite a bit, or if the keys are for a locker that measn this person regularly carries a lot of stuff they have to deposit in said locker. This is all information we could know about someone just by knowing they possess these items, not even getting into any details about the items, or getting into more than just 3 of them.

Now, i wanna be very clear, this diagram is Not supposed to be used as a base to make your own deductions, i'm not giving you a diagram for you to whip out as a guide for when you see a phone or a set of keys, and i'm definitely not encouraging you to immediately see an analog watch and follow this diagram to conclude it has a single use, and then use that as a base for your deductions. This diagram is supposed to be nothing more than an example, and not by any means the extent of the deductive process you should go through when dealing with these objects in your own deductions. In fact, you can see the diagram is not actually complete, and it doesn't include any specific details about these objects nor how the conclusions link together from object to object. Seeing these objects in real life will not always have you arrive at the same conclusion, since each deduction is hugely situational, and specific details about these objects might lead you down completely different paths. All i want you to take from this diagram is the methodology of extracting and navigating information

That being said, i do encourage you to start thinking about the observations you make as clusters like these, little groups of implicit information that comes with anything you observe. Expand it onto things like scratches on a phone screen, stains on a shirt, fingernails, shoes, desks, lamps, anything. Make sure to use these very simple, little steps to slowly carve your way to the big conclusions.

That's it for today, i hope this post was helpful and maybe better illustrates how to actually extract information from what you observe. If you have any questions my inbox is open.

Happy Observing!

-DV

This is a Reddit-friendly transcript of a post in one of my main blogs focused on Deduction, you can find links to the post here, the links to my blogs here: Studies in the Art of Deduction and Amateur Deductions

How many times has anyone heard any deductionist, be it in real life or in media, say that word? “obviously” think about it, we use this word pretty loosely. Think about every time you’ve read or heard a deduction, be it from me, any other deductionist out there, or even Sherlock, think about how unbelievable they sound when you first hear them. Now think about the explanation and how simple it sounds when it's all been layed out.

I encourage you to go read an explanation to an interesting deduction, or listen to your favorite deduction explanation scene from a show, you should be on the lookout for two things: First, notice the way it all fits together, everything has a logical basis and explanation, and second, notice how simple each individual fact and connection is. 

The main problem when people start deducing is they overcomplicate the process, they see how Sherlock Holmes or any other deductionist achieves these amazing, huge deductions (which sometimes appear completely unrelated to the facts and evidence), and they want to replicate these results, without realising there’s an extremely long train of thought that connects facts, deductions, conclusions, probability, and a plethora of other factors, just to get to that single amazing deduction. Now something to understand is that long doesn’t mean complicated. After all deduction is, at it’s core, just logic. 

All that has to be done to deduce is reach the logical, probable conclusion. Once evidence is observed, think of questions like “how’d this get here?” “what does this mean?” “why did this get here?” etc. and answer them in a logical, obvious way, this will get you further than you may think.

Deduction works by starting out with little pieces of information, and filling out the blanks, until we get to the bigger conclusions. This is the main cycle of deduction, those conclusions then trigger more deductions, which give more conclusions, and so on, so forth. We do not reach impressive deductions by making huge leaps and connections, but with little steps that follow a logical, simple train of thought, so simple you should find yourself thinking each step is pretty obvious

This is a post i made once upon a time in an old blog of mine, i thought i'd revise it and upload it here since i think it's a very important thing to keep in mind, while the big deduction doesn't have to be an obvious conclusion, each little step does have to be obvious. With that in mind i'll leave the post here, as always send any questions my way and i'll do my best to answer them

Happy Observing!

-DV