Obviously

Damian Valens

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. 

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GIF by mycroftslittlebrother

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

Follow Damian on his blog Studies In The Art of Deduction

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Parrot’s comment

This is a great post to slow you down from trying fancy deduction too quickly. My personal take: “making “obvious” deduction is both easy and hard”

Hard, because it would require you not only a chain of knowledge in different subjects but also the presence of mind to connect the dots.

Easy because you know more than you think, and what you know is different from what other people know. Which makes what you can deduce, others can’t and vice versa. Which makes your “obvious” impressive to others.

Is there a way to neutralize “hard”

Combine your deduction together! Sounds just like stacking

Develop your bee hive (article coming soon).