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deduction-tutorials · 4 months

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Not an ask, just wanted to say your blog seems pretty cool! I've had a mind palace for years, but I've only recently started to learn deductions, so it's super helpful.

Thank you so much, you should check out mentalism examples for my mind Palace work. It's also my forte, along with how to do blindfold chess and things like that. :)

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deduction-tutorials · 11 months

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Deduction Exercise 2: "Playing Police"

OBJECTIVE: FIND AND RECORD AS MANY VIOLATIONS OF LAWS AND SIGNS AS YOU CAN FIND

Details: Go out to a public space, anywhere that has a lot of people, even just the middle of the street. While in this place keep in mind the rules and regulations attached to it (eg. the driving laws of your country if you're walking down the street, if you're at school then rules and regulations like "No phones in the classroom" or specific dress code regulations, the laws for smoking indoors if you're at a cafe). Also make sure to look around for any location specific signs that enforce a certain behavior (eg. "No Smoking" or "No Parking"). Make sure that these rules and regulations are at least partially official, not unspoken rules or social norms, but actual regulations that are probably written down in some code of conduct at the location you find yourself in (eg. a workplace).

Now that you're in this headspace and are keeping all of these in mind, look around a record as many instances of people breaking these rules as you can find. Anything from someone clearly smoking in a non smoking area, to a car not using their blinker, or not stopping at a stop sign when they technically should have.

Play devil's advocate as much as possible and don't be afraid to stick to the "technically" argument (eg. "technically he should've stopped at that stop sign", "technically those shoes are not appropriate according to the dress code"). The point of this exercise is not to call people out, but to

Train yourself to observe the world around you in a more careful manner

Train yourself to observe people's behavior and the differences between people who follow rules and people who don't

Arguably most importantly, train yourself to look for things that are marginally out of place or missing, things that should be different, but that mostly go unnoticed

Now, go try it out

Happy Observing!

-DV

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deduction-tutorials · 1 year

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How To Get Accurate But Interesting Deductions

Note: I’m working on…working on a little project on deduction, I think it’ll be pretty interesting, once finished. It’s a pretty laborious one that requires the collection of information and a lot more bullshit, so…you probably won’t be seeing that, anytime soon.

Okay, so back to the topic: How to get accurate but interesting deductions. This is very broad. Honestly, I chose this title because I knew that the kind of people who’d be attracted to it would probably be the ones who need to hear it. Some phrases these people may use while reasoning:

“Because they’re an idiot”

“Because they want to impress potential romantic partners”

“Because they’re slow”

“Because they’re shallow”

“They’re mentally unwell *insert mental illness here*”

If you find yourself saying these things, then you probably need to read this post. Humanization: it’s important. I’m not here to be the morality police, or whatever— it’s just a fact.

Do you want to stop getting the same, surface level, inaccurate, blanket statement deductions? Then deduce people, not a version of your projections. If you haven’t guessed, I lean more towards the psychological aspect of deduction, and I’ve gathered that humanizing the people you deduce will help you psychologically profile them.

The thing is, deductionists sometimes underestimate or dehumanize the people they’re deducing. Whether they do it to feel better about themselves, to force a more interesting story onto their person in order to come up with more exciting conclusions, or whatever they’ve got going on, doesn’t matter. The point is, they don’t think other people are allowed to be intelligent, or substantial and interesting.

As a deductionist, one of the worst things you can do is judge the person you’re deducing. It’s not your job to judge them, you’re supposed to be analyzing them.

Your projections and clumsy methodology will only get in the way of that. When you deduce them, give your person a chance. Give them as much justice as you would want to be done onto you. If you want accurate deductions, then actually treat people like…people. Look for meaning in everything, then just discard the ones that don’t fit into the picture— it’s better than missing a piece.

For example, a person I was deducing, along with others, had an old blanket with cartoons on it. Here’s how one person went wrong:

Cartoon blanket—> immature, possibly autistic/ADHD, not many friends.

Can’t they just be young or sentimental?

Either attached to childhood, looking for comfort, or financially unstable?

No books—> stupid, shallow, immature.

E-books are a thing. His book could’ve been in his locker, at school, or hell, in his backpack in another room.

Shoes inside the room—> messy, no parents at home, slob.

Could be, or it could be a matter of convenience. It could be a matter of routine. Or, he could have extracurriculars and has to be somewhere, after. He could have a social thing, which would go against the whole “no friends, loser” thing.

When you deduce someone, treat it like a courtroom inside your head. There are two attorneys, the defense, and the prosecutor. One person looks for meaning, stretches and bends over backwards to redeem your person, while the other just goes buckwild and absolutely shits all over their little head. It’s called balance.

People are allowed to be as smart and interesting, maybe even moreso, than you. People are allowed to be complex.

Anyways, I know I neglect this blog a lot. In my defense, you hit a certain plateau, when you’ve been deducing for a while. I don’t know when I’ll upload again, but…ya’ll eatin’ today. Bye.

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deduction-tutorials · 2 years

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i have igsce coming up with no prep in 9 months can deduction and minds palaces help me and how

Mind palaces would help loads. You can learn at a much faster rate with them. (My mate memorised the whole periodic table in a day for his exams) Especially at GCSEs when it's mostly memory based. I can go through it step by step with you in you like. The general plan I've used to get near perfect grades is Make an image for every topic and put it into a mind palace each image will link to smaller mind palaces with salient details You can cram super effectively if this is done right, although you will generally use different methods based on the topics you are doing Knowing what exists and being familiar with it really helps on it's own, and memorising the facts with mind palaces will give you a lot of confidence.

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deduction-tutorials · 2 years

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A Testament

Hello!

A great deduction blog (tutorials) (examples) recently got started up by my very cool friend, Sherlly. This post is only a small testament to Sherlly's deduction skills ever since I've known him, which has been for quite a while now.

I'll start off with the very first things he showed me he could do – which I know will sound insane, but I witnessed all of it myself:

- Deduce my interests at the time from my blog. (Asian cultures and deduction)

- Deduce that English isn't my first language only based off of text. (neither British nor American)

- Deduce where an item that a friend of his had lost was.

- Knew a ton about a variety of topics, such as the relation between stuttering or the ability to see with how the brain forms images.

- He's always been a maths genius. He would come up with proofs all by himself and do lots of maths in his free time.

- Could solve a Rubik's cube blindfolded.

- Could tell what someone wrote on a piece of paper just by hearing their pencil strokes.

- He also learned magic and mentalism very quickly, he would ask me a few seemingly unrelated questions and correctly guess what I had in mind.

- This one's probably an odd one out but he could juggle real good! :3

All of what I've mentioned is what I know for sure he could do at just 16.

I'm sure there's lots to add to that list, but either my memory fails to conjure more or I simply never got to know the rest.

If that list wasn't endless then, it is now. At least I think so.

- He can tell what someone types on their phone just by observing the movements of their fingers.

- He developed a vast mind palace and uses it so well and seamlessly. He has over 25 mind palaces. He has mind palaces for temporary information and others for permanent information. So he has an excellent memory. He once lost his phone contacts, but that wasn't much of a problem to him. He simply already had everyone's numbers memorised.

- He developed a 3 digit memory system, which is insane to think about. Literally a thousand digits, each digit a unique image. His system has a thousand unique images.

- He used memory techniques to memorise a ton of things:

* The periodic table

* All cities of the UK

* All US states along with their capitals (he mentioned some to me, the state Maine particularly stuck with me because he explained his thought process so well. It went: Maine sounds like a lion's mane, lion = Leo, Leos are born in August. So the capital of Maine is Augusta!)

* Digits of Euler’s number

* Digits of the Golden Ratio

* Digits of Pi

* All (yes, all) the countries of the world

* The Krebs Cycle

- He can memorise 50 digits in a minute.

- He can memorise a deck of cards in less than 2 minutes.

- He learned chess very quickly and reached quite a high rating in just a year. Not only that, but blindfold chess too! He could see moves in his head that his seeing opponent would not!

- He learned data science in like a year and even landed a job as a data scientist.

- He knows so much about art, fashion, music, computer science, networking, many fields of science, religions, have I mentioned he's a maths genius? I could go on.

God, this sounds a bit like an infomercial of some kind, doesn't it? But the least I can do is tell everyone how awesome my friend is. I realise I sound like I'm describing a handy robot or something, but it's just because he really is that incredible. I have known him for years, and I can not stress enough how real all of it is because he showed me whenever he learned anything new. And he somehow continues to learn new things and get better at everything he already is exceptional at.

Not only is he capable of all of that and more, he's also a wonderful teacher. He taught me a few magic tricks some years ago. He taught me so much maths! I particularly remember first learning about arcsin, arccos, arctan and their derivatives from him, before I got to learn them in college. He taught me a lot about programming and data analysis. He also helped me make a mind palace of my own and store information in it. I can still recall the 32 digits of Pi he helped me memorise - he can do over a hundred digits of Pi by the way.

He's always been a very patient teacher, answering every question no matter how small with no judgement despite being unbelievably good at what he's explaining. He's very kind, compassionate, understanding, and most of all so humble.

This post would never end if I kept going. Honestly I thought it would be much longer than this, but my words are limited and there's probably more that I just can't remember at the time of writing.

Either way, words couldn't do him justice. You can check out his blogs (tutorials blog) (examples blog) so you can see for yourself how he knows so much about so many things, and most importantly to learn along. You'll learn so much.

You can also reach out to him and message if you need help with anything. As I've mentioned, he really is an amazing teacher, and you will learn a lot from him and his blogs.

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deduction-tutorials · 2 years

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This is a perfect addition and example of me not thinking globally. I never would of considered a lot of these valuable tips. Maybe being able to mentally drive around is a good idea, but I think if people are all driving it is probably more important to know how they are driving (drive themselves or passenger, maybe can tell by which arm is tan in hot countries?) and what places there are within driving distance. Thank you for expanding my mind!

Know your local area

Knowing your local area is useful for many deductions and problem solutions. You know ideally be able to walk around your local town / city in your mind with a fair amount of detail. You should know names of street, which areas are bad, good and how to get from each place by bike, train or skateboard. You can even go the extra mile and learn bus schedules, train schedules and the like to further enhance deduction. If you deduce someone does not own a car and live in another part of town and you know public transport well, you can figure out a lot and predict where people will be. This is useful for mind palace reasons as well. This original post had me memorising all cities in the UK, but got deleted at the last minute after I had finished so I will save that for a future post.

#additionally #clever #deduction

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deduction-tutorials · 2 years

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Introduction - All things on this blog are things I have done

Some context on me: I have had many jobs and experiences many within cultures and places. I used to be a performing mentalist, and am now a data scientist. I have had jobs in cleaning, paper delivery, human resources, and more. Since high school, I've been competitive in memory sports as well. Since I am generally interested in everything, I have always cast a large net in terms of learning.

I firmly believe that prior experience is the key to almost all deduction. For example: The cleaning products someone uses can be used to infer what they clean or their profession. How someone reacts to a mentalism trick can shed light on their personality or their experiences (generally people who react badly haven't worked in customer service or performed before). I am familiar with these sorts of deductions because of my prior experience.

As such, this blog is not geared towards a list of facts. It is a clear guide to gathering your own heuristics and skills, with a few salient examples included to help you.

Some quick advice: Be open to unusual media. I have learned more for deduction from beauty magazines and rural cultivation videos than I have from most deduction specific media. Another example is fake psychic books have thousands of tips for reading people, because psychics use deduction to determine facts about a person, and then use memory techniques to retain those facts for extended periods of time.

When learning deduction, it's vital to have some clear goals to guide you, even if this goal changes over time. You should have one for self-identification and motivation purposes. For Sherlock Holmes, it was catching criminals. For House MD, it was being a great doctor. For me, it's mainly a parlour trick, and a way to spot evil intent in my life. Once you know your goals, you can learn the relevant knowledge specific to those goals. Of course, all deductionists, no matter their goals, must have a few underlying skills: well-trained observation, a high-work ethic, humility, and a near-pristine memory.

All of these things can be trained.

#introduction #introductory post

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deduction-tutorials · 2 years

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Deduction Training Plan Overall

The approach of this blog is like a series. It will go over the basics all deductionists must know in order to be effective with examples and tips.

First of all, pick a theme for your deductions so you are not overwhelmed by all possible choices of what you learn, for example Medical knowledge, Music, crime, etc. This will also inform the specific skills you may want such as lock picking, first aid, Rubik's cube solving, blindfold chess, etc.

The general skills required are listed below with how they are achieved in brackets, but should be worked on congruently.

Observation and retaining information (Observation exercise and speed focused memory techniques)

Prior knowledge (Longevity focused memory techniques)

Inference (This is one of the hardest to practice and the easiest to delude yourself into thinking you are good at. creative, intelligent and accurate inferences are the goal of deductionists)

Humility (A deductionist should be constantly trying to prove themselves wrong in order to be right. Ego and arrogance is the death of science and reasoning)

#deduction #training #summary #first step

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deduction-tutorials · 2 years

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Observation Training (and what to do after you notice something)

Observation training is a hard habit to form, it has many monikers through academic and other literature. Mindfulness, awareness, sometimes common sense. Like many deduction habits, it requires you to be active and go out into the world. It comes in two difficult steps

Gain an order observation habit

Use speed memory techniques to memorise salient facts

The first step is to make rigorous observation an unconscious habit, which requires more effort than you'd initially think. Good observation requires a pattern, for me it's top to bottom, left to right. This sweeping observation is used every time I enter a room or see a person. This habit will be harder to form than you think, but keep reminding yourself and eventually this will be an unconscious habit. You will find yourself noticing more and more, and temporal spot the difference when things are changing over time. Once this is complete, you should start adding in more things. A small list is below (from my trained habits), but get creative with your habit forming and make it relevant to your goal.

Count steps whenever you walk up or down

Read all signs, paper, or computer screens even through windows

Read license plates of passing vehicles

One step one is complete, you will be noticing a lot of things about people and places, and in order for them to be useful, you will need to use speed memory techniques to memorise them.

This will details more in a future post, but generally you can look up how to use the mind palace / method of loci technique, along with pegging and a memory system to use this efficiently.

For example, I turn passing license plates into images for my mind palaces temporarily. I generally will do this as a little game when walking about at this point, although at first it was a lot of effort. Details of people can be memorised in similar ways, turn their birthday into an image using a memory system, and place it onto them so you won't forget it (pegging) or place it into a memory palace with an image of them. If you notice a distinctive ring, you can imagine a large version wrapped around their neck so you don't forget it. To practicing memorising at speed, you can memorise a deck of cards as fast as possible / numbers as fast as possible. Aim to get around 30 to 40 digits in a minute and a deck of cards in under 5 minutes as a baseline. There is also plenty of resources of name and face memorisation.

#observant #observation #deduction #training

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deduction-tutorials · 2 years

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Memory Techniques for beginners

The main methods used for deductionists are linking, method of loci / mind palace and a good memory system.

Memory system The memory system will be an image for each of the digits from 000 to 999, or 00 to 99. for example, 949 would be dalek and 622 would be a chess bishop in my system. Systems like this can be built in many ways, my preferred method is by category, for example 500s is youtubers, within that, the 520s are magicians, and within that 8 is someone who's name begins with a B, so 528 is Ben Cardall in my memory system. This turns abstract data (cards, numbers, etc) into a more memorable image that you can use with the other techniques. Linking

Linking is a technique used to connect two bits of data, often used to connect a name to a face, or words in different languages. An example would be imagining a butterfly landing on your finger while you do your marriage pose at a Spanish wedding to remember butterfly is mariposa in Spanish. Method of loci

The method of loci or mind palace is a very powerful technique. It is used to store long term data usually, and I have used it to memorise vast amounts of data such as all countries, periodic table, my phone's contact list, 100+ digits of famous constants, art history and more. It works by thinking of a place, such as your home, and making a set path through it with several locations called loci. For example you might have your front door as the first loci, the shoe rack as the second and so on. You then mentally place images here to help you recall things. For example, the 7 wonders of the ancient world can be remembered with the list below, where 1 is the first loci

A pyramid for pyramid of Giza

A garden for gardens of Babylon

A giant crossing a road for Colossus of Rhodes

A lighthouse with someone called Alex inside for lighthouse of Alexandria

A temple full of art to remind you of the temple of Artemis

Zeus to remind you of the statue of Zeus

A coffin with someone called Hali trying to get a car ride to remind you of the mausoleum of halicarnassus

#deduction #memory #sherlock fandom

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deduction-tutorials · 2 years

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Applications of memory techniques (speed and longevity)

Memory techniques used by deductionists are linking, mind palace / method of loci, and a memory system. These are used for connecting two bits of data without mental space, storing large complex data and turning abstract data into memorable images respectfully. Memory technique uses often fall into two categories, the information you need for a short amount of time and information you want to store indefinite. Speed Memory Techniques

These are often in situations where you have to store memory fast, but usually for a short period of time. You can always convert it into long term later. For this, you can use linking, for example associating facts with someone like their name and birthdate (turned into images with a memory system) to their face. A small example could be Rich who was born 13th Jan 1995 so I'd turn that into the image of Mr Krabs typing on coins, and the coins are made of gold to remind me of Rich, then place that image on his head to link in. Mind palaces can also be used at speed, for example memorising lots of digits in a minute or license plates as fast as possible. You can reuse mind palaces by "overwriting" the data in them. Generally, you want to focus on speed than the richness of the images. for practice, I'd recommend learning to memorise a deck of cards in under 5 minutes and 30 digits in a minute. Although you can get much faster than this, see memory competitions for further details. Longevity memory Techniques

These will be used for things you want to use a reference, maybe your phone's contact list or periodic table or flags of the world. There are many uses. Generally, this will take more time as you should use a mind palaces dedicated for each bit of data. You should enrich each image and connect it to every loci to make it more "sticky" and if done well, these information can last weeks or months without revision. I have a close friend who assimilates a lot of long term data, he is like a book, and his advice was to make these sorts of mind palaces neat, orderly and 'perfect' for you. Things should be intuitive so later on, it all makes sense. These long term palaces are often used when I want to ace exams as well.

#memory #deduction #sherlock holmes

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deduction-tutorials · 2 years

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Inference (actual deduction)

This topic is tricky. Examples are rare, and often specific to your goal. I will give some examples within, but be creative and add your own flair. It is often the case you cannot deduce much about a person other than what is obviously visible like their gender, personality, handedness, and brands of clothing. Do not worry, even these things are noteworthy and when something more interesting like signs of a previous injury or criminal history do show up, you will be ready and able to infer them. Learning sherlockian deduction comes in two, hard steps.

Trying to deduce things

Proving yourself wrong

The second step is where most amateurs fail, you need to verify your reasoning and update your techniques. It is useless to get the correct result through the wrong method and it is equally useless to get a wrong result and not realise you got a wrong result. You need to be rigorous with yourself and honest about mistakes and flawed reasoning. Practicing is hard, and should be done in a controlled environment where you can check yourself. Ideally, deduction doesn't happen in the moment but from prior experience or knowledge, for example due to my knowledge of religious garments I can determine if someone is Sikh by their bracelet (Kara) or with my knowledge of magic, I can tell if someone is a beginner coin magician if they have a bruised ring or callous on their palm that forms when learning the anti-gravity coin trick. Sometimes you may notice something outside of your experience or memorised knowledge such as an odd stain or a friend changes their schedule randomly. These things require reasoning more than prior knowledge, or reasoning with a combination of prior knowledge. It is worth taking your time here to think of several possibilities. You may not be able to narrow it down to just one and that is okay, do not rush yourself as this is an intuition building exercise, the next time a similar problem comes along you may jump the correct conclusion immediately because the the time spent here. To practice

Avoid vague things like personality deductions or common things like using barnum statements. These will delude you into thinking you are deduction a lot more than you are.

It depends on your goals, so unfortunately the clear guide is not so clear here and you will need to get a little creative, if your goal is medical diagnosis, then medical training videos or visiting a hospital or elder home would be your best bet. Make sure to check your conclusions, and in some cases using a medication mind palace may be useful to infer issues a patient has from medication they own. If the goal was entertaining others like for me, you will be in for a bad time at first. You can and will get things wrong in front of others, you just have to roll with it and try more later. If you goal is catching criminals, there are a lot of resources out there. Things like someone's income level not reflecting their spending level, the smells and signs left by drug use, the lists are endless. Generally, you should look, think, make some conclusions and check if they're right. After doing this over and over for a long period of time, you will get better. You will likely need a partner to help you with a lot of these things. Someone to find you photos of rooms and examples of symptoms or crimes without you seeing the source.

#deduction #inference #sherlock holmes

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deduction-tutorials · 2 years

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Final post

This short series is a skeleton guide to sherlockian deduction. A platform for you to build your own training routines. There are more examples and personal recommendations from me here - ( https://www.tumblr.com/blog/mentalism-examples ) and lots of memory content on my youtube here - (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmeEGCwNfNK78ufBKt9tGjQ) Tak min ven.

#final #sherlock holmes

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deduction-tutorials · 2 years

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You are too kind :')