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Nebu comments on Rationalist Fiction - Less Wrong
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In defense of Sherlock Holmes:
The typical Sherlock Holmes story has Holmes perform twice. First he impresses his client with a seemingly impossible deduction; then he uses another deduction to solve the mystery. Watson or the client convince Holmes to explain the first deduction, which gives the reader the template Holmes will use for the second (likely inferences from small details). The data that Holmes uses to make the second deduction are in the text and available to the reader--the reader's challenge is to make Holmes's inference in advance.
Holmes himself attributes his success to observation, not rationality. (There's a startling passage in A Study In Scarlet where Holmes tells Watson that he can't be bothered to remember that the sun orbits the earth! Visit the link and search for 'Copernican Theory' in the full text for the passage.) The Sherlock Holmes stories are intended to be exercises in attention to detail, which is surely a useful skill for a rationalist.
I appreciate your defense of Holmes. As I mentioned in another comment, I haven't read much of him, but I do remember one particular passage which annoyed me due to the way I had felt like I could have figured out the deductions had I been there personally, but because of the way Dr Watson narrates, the deduction eluded me.
Basically, Watson describes the client as wearing some sort of "odd circular jewelry with square holes through which a thin string was passed" (paraphrased from memory). From this, Sherlock deduces that the client has recently been on vacation to China. How? Well, that jewelry are Chinese coins, of course!
I know what Chinese coins look like, but was completely misled by Watson's description. Furthermore, "recent vacation to China" is somewhat of a lucky guess. Perhaps it was a friend who went to China, and brought these coins back as a souvenir gift.
Fortunately you can rely on Conan Doyle and writers in general being parsimonious: unlike reality, stories don't contain odd details unless they're important to the plot.