How to Think Like a Detective

Is there a “best fundamentals” book about detective work akin to how “Freedom of the Hills” is the best fundamentals book on mountaineering?

I'd love to see a list of these books when they exist:

Rex Feral - Hit Man

Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying ...

By the way, there is a section of the article where they mention books:

The book Blackstone’s Senior Investigating Officers’ Handbook (5th ed, 2019) by Tony Cook is a unique one-stop guide to all the processes and actions involved in conducting major investigations, presented in a clear and understandable fashion.

For my PhD thesis The Making of an Expert Detective: Thinking and Deciding in Criminal Investigations (2016), I drew on theoretical frameworks developed in social and cognitive psychology to examine the degree to which individual and systemic factors can compensate for inherent biases in criminal detectives’ judgments and decision-making.

The book The Routledge International Handbook of Legal and Investigative Psychology (2019), edited by the psychologists Ray Bull and Iris Blandón-Gitlin, explores contemporary topics in psychological science, applying them to investigative and legal procedures. Featuring contributions from recognised scholars from around the globe (including myself), it brings together current research, emerging trends, and cutting-edge debates in a single comprehensive and authoritative volume.

The book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (2015) by the political scientist Philip E Tetlock and the author Dan Gardner offers a deeper insight into prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, US government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people – including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe-installer, and a former ballroom dancer – who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. These ‘superforecasters’ have beaten other benchmarks, competitors and prediction markets. They’ve even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information.

‘Correlation does not imply causation’: for decades, this mantra was invoked by scientists in order to avoid taking positions as to whether one thing caused another, such as smoking and cancer, or carbon dioxide and climate change. But today, that taboo is dead. The causal revolution has (seemingly) cut through a century of confusion, and placed cause and effect on a firm scientific basis. The Book of Why (2018) by the computer scientist Judea Pearl and the science writer Dana Mackenzie explains causal thinking to general readers, showing how it allows us to explore both the world that is and the worlds that could have been. It is the essence of human and artificial intelligence. And just as these scientific discoveries have enabled machines to think better, The Book of Why explains how we too can think better. ```

I love this genre of books.

A previous request clued me into “Freedom of the Hills” and “The Mariner’s Weather Handbook”

“ The most complete guide to marine weather analysis, tactics, and storm avoidance. Teaches traditional forecasting based on current observed conditions, as well as the latest tools including facsimile charts and the Internet. An easy-to-use tool for sailors, power boaters, professional seamen, and anyone interested in the weather.”

The first three have solved just about every problem that I've ever encountered in software, even in systems that I had absolutely no clue about (which made the first two quite natural ;) ).

Debugging and troubleshooting isn't art or magic, it's just being very boringly methodical and building from the ground up. A single assumption and you're off to a dead end, a single thing taken on hearsay and you will repeat what other people already did, failure to challenge and check will no doubt make you miss something that it crucial to solving the problem.

Agreed. At the bottom of any long-to-debug issue I've encountered is some assumption I absolutely knew to be beyond suspicion that turned out to be wrong.

(That said, it's easy to say in retrospect. In the moment there is always judgement about what to verify first, and of course its always the last thing you check that turns out to be the problem)