Hacker News Reader

I haven't watched my old DVDs in a while, but my recollection is that (in most episodes, at least) Columbo would explain what detail from early in the investigation made him suspicious of the perpetrator and what evidence and/or reasoning he used to rule out the other suspects along the way.

View on HN

Yes, that's true. But I always found it a little annoying that based on some pretty scant initial evidence he focused on a single suspect to the exclusion of all other possibilities. In the real world that would be considered pretty bad police work, notwithstanding that it turned out that his initial hunch was always right. That starts to push up pretty hard against my willing suspension of disbelief after a few dozen episodes.

We only ever see him question a single suspect, but he's constantly alluding to things he's done offscreen

Sherlock Holmes has many flaws, but one thing it does get right is that the titular character repeatedly emphasizes how much of our worldview is defined by assumption, the danger of favoring a preferred hypothesis too early in the investigation, and the importance of systematically eliminating all possibilities until one remains.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com