Changes and Deductions

So i´ve been thinking about Deduction on and off for a few hours now, which makes this a perfect time for another of Damian´s Deduction Rants. This time around the topic is changes! I´ve talked about changes before, mostly in a post about Baselines that i made in my other blog, i talked about how building a baseline and noticing a change in behavior that your could associate to it is massively useful. But i´d like to zoom out and talk about changes in general and how incredibly important they are for deductions.

https://www.tumblr.com/moonlightsunlight1/186054244727/his-smile-aw

So before we get to that, let´s clarify, what do we mean when we say “changes” and why am i making a whole post on it? Well simply enough we´re talking about being able to notice when there is a contrast between observations made in two different situations. Being able to notice that someone went to the bathroom and came back with more make-up on, or that they removed a ring they´d been wearing for months, and being able to use that knowledge to make a deduction is an insanely important skill to have.

These types of deductions come into play when we step away from the most common idea of Deduction we tend to have, and get into a “deduction in everyday life” mentality. When talking about Deduction we like to focus on the specific scenario of meeting a new person (sometimes not even meeting them but just seeing them walking down the street, or sitting at a restaurant, or whatever other mundane situation you have in mind) and being able to instantly extract massive amounts of information from their physical appareance and behavior. But the question arises, what about when we´re dealing we´ve people we already know? can we deduce anything about them? how would we even go about deducing something about, say, our best friend, a classmate, or a coworker? i mean it´s all well and good to be able to deduce that someone has an alcoholic sibling when you´ve never met them before, but this is something you probably already know about someone close to you, like your best friend. Changes are one of the biggest ways we have to make useful deductions in these situations

Now, when talking about changes we have to outline the simplest categorical division in this topic, Short-term changes vs. Long-term changes. (hint: the earlier examples of the make up and the ring correspond to each of these categories respectively). Let´s take a look at each of these individually (as straight-forward and intuitive as they are) and look at a real life example of them being used in deduction (that´s right, this time i come to you with concrete examples from deductions i´ve made that i had the good sense to write down!)

Short-term changes

a lot happens in a person´s life within 24 hours, not all of which you can be present to see, but you can definitely see it´s effects in that person´s appearance. Short-term changes refer to the changes made in observations that were established shortly before, for example at the start of the day. Let´s look at it in action

Let´s take for example a girl from my college class who i joined for breakfast in the cafeteria the morning after a particularly rainy night, the place is a 2 minute walk from class and a 2 minute walk from the dorm she lives in, this all happened before going to the first lesson of the day.

She was wearing a 2 day worn white button up shirt with barely any wrinkles on it, under a light-brown and creme colored sweater, and some freshly laundered white pants (you could still see the clear folding marks on the pants and lack of any semblance of stains on all items of clothing) her hair had also been cleaned and brushed that morning. She was looking fancy, but not more than usual

Why is this important? because she did not in fact attend the first class of the day, she skipped it and returned half way through the second class, and lo and behold, some things had changed. Her shirt and sweater were almost exactly the same, her pants though had acquired a series of wrinkles all throught their length, and had some new dirt stains at the back of the calves. this was all accompanied by her hair being frazzled and slightly messier than when she left breakfast.

Let´s make a pause here and see if anyone can deduce what happened in that hour and a half of her life that we were not present to see. This is the type of short term change that we need to be on the lookout for, we´re not looking to gather information on a person once (and never worry about it again), we wanna look for constant changes from moment to moment, have they put on make-up since the last time you saw them? have they changed clothes? have they acquired any stains on their clothes? what´s different? because anything different is something we can exploit as deductionists to gather information, even on people we see everyday, even on people we may be extensively close with.

The answer to what happened to our fancy lady was simple enough, frazzled hair means something frazzled it, maybe her head was laid somewhere, maybe she was outside and it was very windy. Sudden wrinkles in recently launded pants only appear when said pants are left unfolded for a long period of time in the same position, means she took off her pants and left them somewhere unfolded, clearly not a bathroom, that doesn´t give enough time to form wrinkles, somewhere comfortable, her bedroom maybe? maybe she went back to her dorm to get some more sleep? Oh but wait, the pattern of the dirt marks on the back of the calves suggested she´d been sitting somewhere outdoors. So she sat somewhere outdoors long enough to get her pants dirty, took them off, stayed with them off for a while, laid down, and then got up, put them on, and went to class. So the question now is: does she just leave her clothes unfolded and getting wrinkled while in her dorm? and the answer is no, her shirt is two days worn and does not have a wrinkle on it, so she went somewhere that´s not her dorm. Conclusion: she skipped the first period to take the bus to meet up with some love interest, spent an hour and a half (give or take) with them in bed having… fun, only to rush back to class on a bus again for the second period. And yes, i got the deduction right and won 20 bucks over it.

Long-term changes

It´s all well and good to notice a difference on someone´s appearance relative to an hour ago, but how about something different than it has been for the past month? Long-term differences deal with sudden changes in appearance or behavior that has been observed and has remained unchange for long periods of time. If someone suddenly shows up to work or class in fancy clothes after a month of not particularly working on their appearance, we should be able to notice it and find an explanation for such a change, sometimes it might be simple enough, others not quite.

Let´s take another girl in my class as an example: For the first month of class she always puts the same amount of effort into her appearance, well dressed, quality clothes, sometimes expensive ones, but one thing that immediately stood out this particular day was the usage of perfume, since she never uses any. It´s a small, subtle change, but enough to derive that she´s meeting with someone special, someone that doesn´t see her often or hasn´t seen her in a while, and someone she wants to make an impression on. This particular girl had not seen her family or her boyfriend in months since she had moved countries to study, so the options for who she was meeting that day were fairly obvious, impossible to determine which of the two, but clearly one of those. And since it´s important to confirm your deductions whenever possible, i did so and i was right, her family had come over to visit her that day and she was gonna have dinner with them and show them around.

A few posts ago someone asked me how i see the world as a deductionist, and in my answer i explained that a lot of times i just notice things. The same way you´d notice someone´s wearing a nice watch, i notice someone´s nails have bite marks. In this same manner try to notice changes in people´s appearance throughout the day, not only will it train you to be on the lookout for them, but also asking yourself if something has changed is a great way to notice how much (or how little) you actively observe, since you´ll find yourself wondering things like “huh, has that ring always been there or are they wearing it for the first time, i haven´t noticed if they usually wear rings”, and that´s a great way of seeing flaws in your observation habits

As we can see, we have to realise that Deduction isn´t just applicable when first meeting someone, and most importantly, it´s a skill that can be approached differently in many situations, and that you should feel free to play around with it and try to apply the things you learn in new ways. This time it means looking for differences and changes from one observation to another, but keep trying new things, new ways of solving the puzzle that is finding information

As always if you have any questions or comments feel free to send them over, and stay tuned for a picture deduction i have coming up, it´s another deduction i made in the wild so it´s gonna be fun!

Happy Observing

-DV