A couple of days ago I was scouring the site to get recommendations on some good fiction to read. MoR and Luminosity just seem to whet the appetite! I came across a recommendation for Lawrence Watt-Evans. In the resulting discussion Caladonian comments on Sherlock Holmes:
What about Sherlock Holmes? Once you get past his obvious shortcomings, he's a pretty decent rationalist.
Not really. His 'logic' appears to be solid reasoning the same way a theatrical backdrop appears to be real scenery or a magician's slight of hand appears to be the performance of a mystical action: it has the semblance and nothing more.
Conan Doyle wrote in such a way as to convince people that Holmes was exercising reasoning powers, not to showcase examples of such reasoning. By the power of plot, Holmes was correct, but it doesn't follow that his stated reasoning was.
That did spring to mind when I was reading the passage you describe.
I thought of Conan Doyle too while reading that passage. I think it was a conscious attempt by Eliezer to incorporate some detective-style reasoning. IMO it doesn't work perfectly, but makes for a fine read anyway.
Watt-Evans is nice, but he can't write exciting endings. If only we could cross his work with the Night Watch novels (you might've seen the film, it's an adaptation of Russian fiction) - they aren't as carefully written, but have good unexpected climaxes of just the type Eliezer is shooting for. One of the books ends like this: Gur tbbq thl, jvgu...
Update: This post has also been superseded - new comments belong in the latest thread.
The second thread has now also exceeded 500 comments, so after 42 chapters of MoR it's time for a new thread.
From the first thread: