A man's brain is like a little empty attic (1887) | Hacker News Reader

A man's brain is like a little empty attic (1887)

metaphors.iath.virginia.edu

54 pointsyamrzou24 comments

This is the paragraph that proceeded this line, which prompts Holmes's discourse, and the lines quoted don't work as well without the context:

> His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

I suspect that Doyle gave Holmes this dialog because it was reflective of the character, not because Doyle thought it was a good description of the way the world or the mind works. If you read enough Holmes you can see pretty clearly that his character is very rarely the voice of the author—that's Watson, who admires Holmes's skill but is frequently frustrated by him as a person.

I'm not even really convinced that Holmes could be as skilled as he's supposed to be with as broad ignorance as he's portrayed here as having. The science of deduction as he's supposed to apply it in the stories would actually require rather encyclopedic knowledge of many different topics in order to understand the wide array of humans he's supposed to be reading (and indeed, in later Holmes stories he exhibits this kind of encyclopedic knowledge of extremely obscure details of many fields).

I’ve taken this to suggest he has an eclectic rather than encyclopedic body of knowledge. Having a “well rounded education” is different than randomly jumping deeply into various topics.

Abstractly, everyone is limited to finite life experiences. Knowing the earth orbits the sun is unlikely to be irrelevant for a detective, but knowing local soils might be. If common knowledge would have cracked a case there would be little need of a great detective, thus the greatest detective might be quite ignorant of many things.

Though obviously Holmes might could be having a bit of fun with Watson.

> and indeed, in later Holmes stories he exhibits this kind of encyclopedic knowledge of extremely obscure details of many fields

Correct. The consensus among Holmes scholars is that Holmes was having some fun with Watson given that this is right after they meet and become roommates.

> The science of deduction as he's supposed to apply it in the stories would actually require rather encyclopedic knowledge of many different topics in order to understand the wide array of humans he's supposed to be reading

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I partly disagree with this.

You live with people. A trained person can learn to detect differences - of gestures, habits, behaviour - far more easily, and would not require the broad knowledge that computers need for effective pattern-matching and deduction. (And since Holmes is doing his detective work constantly, he would have been honed and trained enough for that sort of thing.)

That Holmes is ignorant of mainstream things - whilst being extremely conversant in the eclectic - does not necessarily impair his deductive abilities. After all, deduction is just the ability to tie facts after facts and event and event - and to trace effect to causation.

Deducing who might have done something seem entirely within the realm of possibility and limits of Sherlock Holmes' knowledge, given that the evidence he looks into often makes a look of sense in context.

(Now, deducing motive is a different thing altogether - no one really knows what's in the heart of men.)

> I'm not even really convinced that Holmes could be as skilled as he's supposed to be with as broad ignorance as he's portrayed here as having.

Agreed, assuming Holmes wasn’t (as a poster below suggests) essentially just trolling Watson here. That said, I found the first couple of Sherlock Holmes books to be infuriating, with the big reveal at the end coming across as a total deus ex machina that was in no way foreshadowed or set up by the preceding story. Apparently this improves in the later books though?

It doesn't dramatically improve but it does get better than the first few books.

This is early in the detective fiction genre, before anyone had really formalized that you ought to give the reader a fighting chance of getting the answer (or at least they should be kicking themselves for not getting it). Even in stories towards the end of the series Holmes will often just disappear for a whole day, come home and make a cryptic remark to Watson about having found the answer, and then later expose the whole story with the key bits of evidence having been collected off camera.

I think that what makes some of the early stories like A Study in Scarlet particularly hard for people who started with later detective stories is that good portions of them are barely in the detective fiction genre at all, being more about Doyle's fantasies about foreign lands than they are about the detective. That can be pretty disorienting for someone who goes in with expectations that were created by later detective fiction.

Not related but funny:

Men's Brains and Women's Brains with Mark Gungor (Nothing Box) https://youtu.be/SZ6mVumHY9I?si=vWEyWbKcai0tW3CH

I like that concept. But my box isn't what I would call nothing. It's what I would call irreverent or completely useless.

If I'm not thinking of anything, I'm actually thinking about what would happen if trees could talk or if dinosaurs had long blonde hair. Those sorts of useless things. Like a screensaver, I guess.

“It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

I think that last paragraph would be a mistake - as a person with enough self importance to think they are even a little bit of an expert in some field would stop studying others. Knowledge evolves, expands from analogs in other disciplines, etc. Dunning Krueger would stop a person in their tracks following this logic.

For a detective, knowing how many planets there are in the solar system is a useless fact and should not be acquired in order to keep the brain uncluttered.

For goodness sake, I am not a detective and I don't even know how many planets there are anymore in my solar system

The brain is a closet (2009) — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34831330

"What's the name of a bird?"

https://youtu.be/ga_7j72CVlc?t=18

I think the video is slightly different. It tries to convey that you need to disambiguate the illusion of knowledge from the "real" knowledge. If you're going by original post, you might as well think the whole information about the bird is useless.

My thought was filling your brain with the "names of things", and not the underlying non-word models of what those things really are, is like " A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across".

But is that true? Do new facts elbow out the old ones?

Maybe the new facts evict randomly from the cached index of facts? Or maybe they consolidate with old entries into new entries? Eviction from cache doesn't automatically mean deletion from long term storage.

in a way

i think if anyone sits down and has a conversation with their philosophical opposite, they're unlikely to treat the world the same afterwards

I feel like this may be true of attention and short term memory but I'm often surprised at how much people remember and retain if it concerns something they love.

Useful for a specialist in a job that changes little and is always on demand.

I’m going to learn COBOL and throw out this pesky modern clutter filling my attic.

>Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order.

Interesting. My world framework tells me that I can never know in advance what I'll need to do my work. Maybe it was that judo class 7 years ago when I learned about the meaning of "Hajime". Maybe it was that video I stumbled upon which explained why Trump and J Cole became successful by "Dumbing Down". It is especially true for creative people, as inspiration can and will come from anywhere. So now I live my life like a non-stop Slumdog Millionaire story, when I never know what will be useful when. Or maybe I try to use everything I know and that shapes my life in a certain direction ?

100%

I feel it's better to fill your brain but periodically run a sorter through it to organize the stuff. It's often hard to know what's useful and what's not at the first go. Also, it's better to be curious and know things rather than trying to stop yourself from doing that for some theoretical advantage.

The wise man deliberately inhibits learning in order to not forget what he already knows?

Sounds unwise.

Sherlock Holmes is a fictitious character that also makes use of investigative techniques such as phrenology and tobacco ash species identification, make what you will out of that.

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