How To Break Down Information

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.

https://www.tumblr.com/sweatyfbiprofiler/174575285573

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.

https://www.tumblr.com/getsherlock221b/652173444193140736/s%C3%A4mtliche-antworten-erfolgen-morgen

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 is the following:

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