Sherlock Holmes May Not Have Been a Real Crime-Fighter, but His Creator Was | Hacker News Reader

Sherlock Holmes May Not Have Been a Real Crime-Fighter, but His Creator Was

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52 pointslermontov18 comments

Conan Doyle was fascinating, I highly recommend the biography Teller of Tales, he was prescient about a lot of things (submarine warfare, other military issues during WWI) but also fooled by the rampant fraud in the spiritualist movement, like the Cottingley photographs.

This article makes it seem like he personally investigated the cases, he didn’t. What he did was help publicize them and write long book length summaries of the evidence to convince people. He also published a “pamphlet” on Belgian colonial exploitation of the Congo. He worked directly with the lawyers / investigators to get the facts and used his fame and writing ability to get public attention.

He was also one of the prime suspects behind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man fraud which set back scientific community in general, and anthropology in particular quite a bit.

I thought Doyle was fairly quickly ruled out. Charles Dawson seems most likely, has been connected with other frauds and half his collection was fake.

Right you are. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/08/10/sir-arthur-co...

I remember reading this in the 90s in SciAm which was supposedly linked to his deep resentment of scientific community in general.

Memory is a funny thing - that's much more recent than I thought!

This was explored in a semi-fictional and slightly humourous way in the short-lived period drama 'Houdini & Doyle':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houdini_%26_Doyle

As well as in the book "Arthur and George" by Julian Barnes. Highly recommended.

There's a lot about Doyle that was atypical. Brilliant mind. But he believed in some pretty supernatural stuff as well. Faeries and the like.

Imagine what you believe in now that will seem fanciful in a century.

Is that weird? Tons of brilliant people through history have believed in God, spirits, and other supernatural stuff.

I think our period will be jokes about diets.

"The second paleo era"

It seemed fanciful at the time and he was mocked for it quite a bit.

There is nothing supernatural about faeries.

Cryptozoology? I still think it can fall into the supernatural somewhat?

They're supernatural in terms of literary genre, but in terms of the actual content of the belief there's nothing supernatural about the idea that there could be people much smaller than us (unless you also claim they have magical powers).

Well no, a major characteristic of a fairy it that it flies, it has insect-like wings in the back.

And I believe that from a bio-mechanical (muscular, skeletal) point of view, insect-like wings capable on sustaining flight are not possible on a human back.

For an interesting take on this, see the Artemis Fowl series of books where fairies don't have actual wings but are much more advanced that us regular humans, and fly thanks to technological winged backpacks, and this is the origin of the human myth of fairies (they started hiding after middle age, thus why the myth stayed intact).

That seems to me like a natural argument against a natural hypothesis, rather than a proof that the hypothesis is supernatural.

I guess I'm using a definition of "supernatural" like Richard Carrier's: "mental things [that] cannot be reduced to nonmental things" (http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2007/01/defining-supernat...).

So under this definition wizards, psychics, ghosts and gods are all supernatural; but Bigfoot, UFO abductions and fairies aren't.

The Artemis Fowl series is great. Although in the context of this discussion I find it funny that the fairies do have magical powers, it's just that flying isn't one of them.

I'm under the impression that brilliant minds tend to come with eccentricity attached. Part of being brilliant (or at least intelligent) is the awareness that much of what we take as fact isn't. For example, it used to be a "fact" that an imbalance of humors caused all diseases.

The corollary is that when you believe something people think is silly, like that faeries exist, they may be wrong. This is particularly tricky with beliefs like this one which are technically impossible to empirically disprove.

It's honestly easier to just create a bucket labeled 'beliefs' and make your own mental model of keeping track of which things are beliefs and which things are actual fact. You can still pull things out of the bucket and put things into it. It's just easier to manage that way, because you might have to deal with some statements that go from being empirically disproven to proven to disproven to proven and so on and so forth for a long time. Just a consequence of too much information and a brain that can't handle all of it independently.

Being able to trust others in their understanding is helpful but it's probably not going to help you sleep at night trying to figure out what you know and what you don't.

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