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billswift comments on Rationalist Fiction - Less Wrong
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Encyclopedia Brown is an especially bad example. Most of the mysteries he solves, he solves by knowing some piece of minor trivia which contradicts some off-hand statement of the criminal. This promotes "rationality" as "knowing a lot of facts", which is absolutely not what we're trying to promote here, and provides the wrong model of problem solving. Encyclopedia Brown is based on formal logic, not Bayesian probability.
Knowing lots of facts absolutely matters in the real world though. Having a good theoretical framework to organize them and logic (probablistic or otherwise) to manipulate them help too - but not without real facts.