Deductions: Passive or Active?

In my posts, I tend to focus a lot on teaching Deduction concepts and guiding people through its usage and branches, especially when it comes to my Amateur Deductions content, but this time I thought I’d talk about a topic that falls more in the misconception category rather than a lesson or guide to Deduction. This is one of the more interesting deduction topics I’ve tackled so I’m excited to delve into it!

https://www.tumblr.com/animymind/189143424298/smiling-and-smiling

Due to the way we see Deduction portrayed and used most of the time, there tends to be this intense focus on developing this skill the same way we’d practice bird watching or media analysis. We tend to see Deduction as a skill that entails sitting down in a corner of the room and analyzing people, maybe with a notebook to take down our observations, like undercover scientists, never getting involved. We see deduction very much as a passive activity, and I include myself in this behavior, and who can blame us? every time we talk about Deduction we talk about observation, about people watching, about situational awareness, and all of these are skills and activities that require little to no interaction with the environment we’re in, we think of mindfulness, not of involvement.

Now, in light of this, my thesis question becomes: Should Deduction be a mostly, or even an entirely passive skill or uninvolved? and to bluntly answer that question, no, it should not be a passive skill, and making it a passive skill limits your deductions tremendously.

When we learn to deduce, something we should be understanding and learning alongside it is that the world is an inherently interconnected place, what allows us to connect someone’s car keys to their handedness, to their address, to their morning routine, to their recent fight with their significant other, is the understanding that all of these things have some interconnecting threat (this is very much a hypothetical scenario but the example is not unreasonable at all). And with this understanding, a good deductionist should sooner or later conclude that these threats can be manipulated. A good deductionist, therefore, understands that Deduction doesn’t have to be an uninvolved process

Observation, as understood in deduction, is the act of taking in the world around you through the use of your senses, all your senses, but what do you do about the things that are not currently on display? how do we deduce anything about someone’s cleaning habits if we’re not close to them to observe the necessary details? how do we deduce someone’s behavior in groups of friends if we’re only looking at them sitting alone having coffee? We’re only human, and we cannot notice absolutely everything, couple that with the fact that not everything is always on display and you start to realize that there’s a lot that we can’t see, and therefore a lot that is much harder to deduce

Well a skilled deductionist might be able to find a clever connection between what they’re seeing and a totally unrelated subject, which don’t get me wrong, it’s a valid, impressive, and sometimes necessary approach. But a good deductionist can understand that they are in the same system as the subject they’re deducing, and therefore they can manipulate it. They can ask for some change to take a look at the subject’s wallet, they can pass next to the subject in a crowd to smell what perfume they’re wearing, they can ask for the time to look at the subject’s phone, or toss them a pencil to see what hand they catch it with. You are a scientist, and you control the environment around you to have the conditions you need for your experiments

Deduction doesn’t only give you the tools to know things, it gives you the tools to carve your way to information you couldn’t have possibly gotten by passively observing. The world is a dynamic, interconnected, ever-changing place, and deductionists use their skills to understand it and navigate it, but the understanding deduction brings comes with the possibility (and sometimes the responsibility) to influence the world and the people we try to understand

This is very theoretical, and often when I see posts like these trying to teach something as theoretical I find myself asking “yeah sure, but how do I actually do that?”, so apart from the examples I gave earlier, here are a few general things you can do

• Think of where your deductions are before getting involved, and where you could take them if you had a certain piece of data, and then think of how to acquire that data
• Guide interactions you have with people to bring up topics you want more information on
• Set up scenarios with people that lead to an outcome you want (like them pulling out their wallet to pay for something, putting on glasses to see a picture on your phone, or taking them to a hot place so they take off their jacket and let you see any tan lines or tattoos)
• Establish baselines for people and test out different deductions you’ve made part of said baselines, introduce different variables into the situation at hand and see how their baselines shift (for example, get them talking about something they’re passionate about and see how their gesticulations change)

Deduction should definitely be an active process, you’re the one that’s studying how everything connects together, learn to tug on those connections and your deductions will be faster and more efficient

Happy Observing!

-DV