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arundelo comments on Rationality Quotes July 2011 - Less Wrong
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Bill James was asked about the Holmes saying "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth". He responded:
Surely that also depends on the domain you are reasoning about? For example, when debugging computer programs it seems that I am eliminating the impossible all the time. "Hm, this function is not returning the answer I expect. Am I calling it with the wrong argument? (Printf -- no.) Are the calculations right up to this point? (Printf -- yes). Aha, this must be the line that's wrong!"
True! However, I know I've had times in program debugging (though I can't remember a specific one) when I eliminated something "impossible" and it turned out not to be. I think there was usually a flaw in my reasoning though, rather than a flaw in my knowledge of what's possible. (In other words, I overlooked some simple possibility.) Anyway, when I feel like I'm at the end of my debugging rope, I just start from the beginning with an eye towards stuff I could have missed the first time around, including stuff that I disregarded as "impossible".
Related: "select" Isn't Broken".
I once wrote code that crashed my C++ compiler. For the life of me I Was sadly never able to reproduce it, but it's definitely in my book as an impossible error. (this is not "the programmed crashed when run", this was "the compiler crashed when trying to compile this program")
When debugging, I now label things as "extremely unlikely" instead...
"Sherlock Holmes once said that once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible. The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it that the merely improbable lacks." -- Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective
This reminds me of something Eliezer said.
False.
True. (So?)
True.
False (unless he meant realistic?)
I think the previous appearance of a quote about this Sherlock Holmes quote bears out its falsity, except for Laplace's Demon-type intelligences.
The statement is a literally true statement as a matter of logical deduction. When using the words 'true' and 'false' then logic is what you are doing. Applying the word 'false' to 'true' statements is simply an error, as would be holding this particular quote to a different standard to any other logical claim. It has the same problems as logical reasoning generally does, those of assuming certainty of premises and relying on incomplete or incorrect simplified models. Focus on the dangerous not incorrect because accuracy just is not the flaw.
Instead of false consider (something like) "f@#%ing stupid". Or you are just wrong.
It seems a bad heuristic to follow for ordinary folks, susceptible to overconfidence in their judgements of "impossibility".