Generalized Deduction

28, November, 2023

Rated: ⭐⭐⚝

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Arising Problem

A common picture that I’ve seen with new people who wanted to get into deduction, and even beginners, is that they think of deduction like a psychic. People expected to look at a person and tell their whole life. It’s simply impossible.

Questions that these people ask usually to sound like: “How do you deduce a chef?” “How do you deduce a police?” or statement such as “I don’t know where to look.”

When deducing with these types of questions, you must have a parameter first since these concerns are too narrow. Situation like you have narrowed down to 3 suspects and wanted to use their specific characteristics and see how it matches the situation. Another one would be you understand the mechanics, the tricks of the situation, and you’re looking for a specific piece of evidence that you know it’ll be around somewhere.

So how should you approach deduction ?

Generalized Deduction

I’ve found making deduction in a broader sense proved to be more useful when it came to deducing something completely new such as strangers, pictures, etc. You conclude with terms on the traits of this person or object. Then, you conclude specifics after gathering every information available, combine with hypothesis and see if they fit together.

Let’s go through a few example.

Tinder

Really try to come up with a cool name, but I think this is a fail attempt to apply deduction smoothly (my first successful deduction irl) so let’s leave it at that.

This is a girl that I matched on Tinder and my deduction creeped her out instead of impressing her. Let’s talk about generalized deduction in this case.

I won’t share much of her profile, but these are a few observations that I saw. She had a picture of her studying with the age being 28. She has a few pictures with well-dressed, modest outfit. While talking to her, I notice that she likes to ask me “interview questions” and try to be “on top”. Let’s keep it simple and stop with these 3.

With these 3 observations, I concluded her that she’s academic, modest, formal, masculine. And these theme keeps coming back (validation).

Note: before you think it’s stupid, let me just say that from looking at the picture above, the only guess that you can make about her is that she was in Paris, and give up there.

Now each of these generalized deduction by itself can go to many different directions, but together, they only show one thing. Take a guess before continuing to read.

Academic would have led to many professions, I don’t need to include them all here. You can pick any traits and continue from there.

Modest and formal makes her something of a public figure that need to be this way (she cares about how she looks) so this narrow down to teacher and lawyer (both academic and need to have a public figure). I previously thought that she could be a doctor or nurse (academic) but these professions don’t need to be modest and formal dressed.

Adding with “trying to be on top” further confirm this deduction. The next piece is age. With her age being high while the picture remains young (old picture), I leaned towards a lawyer because a teacher don’t need that much education compared to a lawyer, more time for social and new pictures.

I’m aware that these are still really weak deductions instead of a 100% correct one, that’s why I approached by jokingly asked if I can be a match with a lawyer. In this case, it’s correct, but it creeped her out, lol.

This is a pretty long post already so I won’t include another example, but the most recent one I made is this one