Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Conan Doyle was into a lot of pseudoscientific stuff and it runs through his Holmes stories. He didn't think of it as "pseudo-" at all so just presented it as run of the mill science, like the hoary "10% of your brain" nonsense. Holmes' "reasoning" processes were often pretty dubious too.

I read those stories as a kid (we had a huge single volume for some reason) and tried to figure out how to emulate Holmes' thinkings so I could be as smart as him (and not be the hapless Watson). That resulted in quite a bit of time in the library chasing things down which caused me to learn that things in books aren't always true and that adults were often idiots. So I can't say that reading Sherloc Holmes stories were bad for me, but the process destroyed any interest I had in anything Holmes related.

View on HN

Really? Most of the stories are well done even if not every bit of his "ratiocination" holds up. I feel like one can enjoy them for what they are without trying to take them as real-life forensic science.

It just sits a bit bitter when you used to look at him as an unconventional man who employed the scientific process of deduction to solve his cases.... only for you to later realise that he was applying abductive reasoning the whole time, whilst claiming otherwise and chasing down any lead like a mad dog. Holmes wasn't smart, just driven.

That's one of the problems with mystery writing - the protagonist can never be smarter than the author. The books can say Sherlock Holmes is a genius polymath intellect with brilliant deductive capabilities but he was written by a guy who believed the Cottingley Fairies were real, so...

Holmes does use a scientific process. He forms hypotheses and tests them, and when they are proven wrong he synthesizes the new information and then repeats until he solves the case.

Wasn’t the whole concept of detective work fairly new when the books were being written? The earliest Holmes stories are quite indebted to Poe’s work with C. Auguste Dupin and he invented the form.

I really like Sherlock stories, but yes, they are seldom all that rational.

I remember in one story Sherlock concludes a man must be smart because his hat size is large. I mean, come on, even in Doyle's time this would have raised more than one eyebrow.

I don't hold this against the stories because my enjoyment of them is more about the mystery and Sherlock as a character, rather than they actually making rational sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com