But when you look at what Sherlock Holmes does—you can’t go out and do it at home. Sherlock Holmes is not really operating by any sort of reproducible method. He is operating by magically finding the right clues and carrying out magically correct complicated chains of deduction. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems to me that reading Sherlock Holmes does not inspire you to go and do likewise. Holmes is a mutant superhero. And even if you did try to imitate him, it would never work in real life.
To me, he just sounds like an extremized example of the attitude Jaynes describes in the first chapter of PT:TLoS (“Bayesianism as opposed to Aristoteliansm and Wilsonism” as Yvain puts it). But then again, I read it many years before I read Jaynes, so I might just have been misremembering it.
To me, he just sounds like an extremized example of the attitude Jaynes describes in the first chapter of PT:TLoS (“Bayesianism as opposed to Aristoteliansm and Wilsonism” as Yvain puts it). But then again, I read it many years before I read Jaynes, so I might just have been misremembering it.