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

Post by s-shellfish » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

indigochill wrote: post #14

newswriter99 wrote: post #3

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.

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 tri…

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 17, 2018, 6:28 PM UTC

s-shellfish wrote: post #21

indigochill wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tri…

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…