Interview with Damian – Your first step into deduction

Damian Valens has been studying deduction for roughly 10 years. He is a well-respected member in the deduction community. You can find him at his tumblr or his reddit where he has a link tree to his other social.

In today interview, he will answer these questions.

The State of deduction

Deduction was more prominent and a lot more popular back then. People started with the production of Sherlock BBC. If you do the detective work yourself, you can actually find a lot of evidence on Tumblr, where people shared a lot of theories, original posts, personal findings on the subject.

Unfortunately, it started dying out with the end of Sherlock BBC. Nowadays, you can only see beginners, people reblog old posts, not enough people making content.

*Addition from Parrot: I think it is harder for people to study deduction because there’s not enough data and guides, compared to its counterpart: Geoguessr.

Parrot’s tumblr

How to approach deduction?

There are a few ways to start deduction.

The normal process is Observation to Deduction to Conclusion, which is fine. However, when going deeper, people often try to deduce and stuck in the moment, what Damian calls: “the moment you realize you have eyes” and try to deduce everything you see.

When you see this person have anime posters, you “deduce” this person like anime. This is not a deduction, this is an observation at best.

The simplest example would be guessing the handedness. While it is pretty obvious, it still requires a degree of deduction.

The advised way would be start with the simple stuff, start with the “single step deduction”. Maybe looking at someone clothes or room and you conclude some idea about this person’s economic status.

Check out Damian’s post on How to break down information

*Addition from Parrot:

“The moment you realize you have eyes” is quite true. When I started daily training and started to deduce everything, but get nothing out of most of the object, my confidence went down significantly. You can see that I stopped commenting on reddit for awhile now (mostly because of bot reposting, but this too).

However, this is not to discourage you from training daily. This is a head-up for the coming trouble you might go through. Take one step back and two forwards.

What is single step deduction.

If you look at example of Sherlock deduction in the BBC series, it is pretty well-written, break it down and you can sometimes see a 1 step deduction.

The formula is: Observation to Deduction. 1 single step.

The simplest example is again: handedness. If you see a pencil on the right side of the table, you can conclude that this person is right handed pretty confidently.

Single step deduction is as simple as possible. Assuming you’re seeing a black box. All you need to do is making a deduction that doesn’t require you to link to multiple things, multiple points of information, what time does it happen during the day, what kind of person would use this, have I seen this before somewhere.

You need to know that this simple step will be the foundation for your train of thought for more complex deductions.

*Addition from Parrot: The truth is like a train, with facts being the rail road. If you skip the first easy step, you’ll miss the piece that help the train run to the final destination.

Check out my take on Layering.

What is the skillset roadmap for deduction?

The deduction will get wilder after 1 step deduction, but that’s the foundation. Then you connect different stuff in your mind in different ways. After you gathered every information, you can deduce about things that you don’t necessarily see.

If you go past that, it will give you room for more creative and wild options. Then you can formulate and test out your theories, test out different ways of approaching deduction and details.

*Addition from Parrot: My approach is slightly different with the same structure: Observation – Deduction – Conclusion.

My approach is Observation – Deduction – Data building. This is built with increased difficulty but more revevance, from up close – distant object – moving objects – human – human rules and more.

Damian’s current and future project.

Damian used to have a training program that he did with his friends, however, this is currently on pause.

Currently, there are a few posts, scheduled to be released soon. He also has a lot of ideas that he wants to include in his posts.

Damian also plan on developing his YouTube channel and Tiktok in the future. He said Tiktok really has a lot of potential for audience.

*Addition from Parrot:

I also have some plan for real life deduction in the form of video in the last stage of my plan. I’m looking forward to it with Collab from different deductionists as well as casual collaborators. This is already in motion, just waiting for the right time to fire.

Advise for beginner.

“Deduction is a marathon, not a sprint.”
When you first come to deduction and learning from sources, you’ll get interested pretty quickly with the first few successes. However, then, you will hit a wall of improvement. You will find it harder to make successful deduction. Don’t give up, push that in and continue your path.

*Parrot’s advice: Practice daily even if you don’t feel like. The one who hit the gym everyday will beat the one who only go to the gym when they want to.