How can I become like Sherlock Holmes?

Learn to notice when things seem out of place, and make hypotheses about why. That'll get you close, though the sleight of hand in the Sherlock Holmes books is selecting one of the millions of hypotheses possible with the little data we have, and presenting it as fact.

It's easy to appear smart when you say "you had a fight with your girlfriend, I know because you aren't wearing your Apple watch, which means you left the house in a hurry" and the other character says "wow, spot on". In reality, they'd say "no, it just stopped working so I sent it back".

Somehow you brought back some memory and I remembered there's a subreddit for that [1] it seems dead nowadays but you might have some luck with the top posts if you want to find some content or discussion.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/howtobesherlock/

Take up cocaine:

Holmes’s cocaine use is uniquely framed not as an addiction, but as a defiance of addiction. Holmes masters the drug as he masters the demands of his work.

http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/152748/

It seems you can't use the same excuse for the strippers, pity.

Learn how to do cold reads of people and situations.

Cold read enough, and with enough vagueness, and you'll be right enough of the time.

You could also ask: "How can I be like William of Baskerville?"

I would say: develop a meditation habit. Learning to see your thoughts leads to learning to see your life, and see the life of the people around you.

J

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes." - Sir Author Conan Doyle

1) Pay attention.

2) Ask the writers' questions: who, what, where, when, why, and how.

3) Read.

I also agree with this[1] comment - meditation promotes mental clarity.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39448694

How can I effectively narrow down the search space? I often observe myself to be going around circles/stuck in rabbit holes. Lack of clarity perhaps.

I was thinking of something along the lines of CEA (I felt that I could relate to this) with better heuristics if it makes sense. Sort of like optimized bruteforce methods.

If it doesn't, then it would be helpful to know why and what can I do to improve on these flaws.

I asked this question partly because I have seen people with really good investigative/debugging skills and it reminded me of Sherlock Holmes. "How do they do it?" This question would often strike my mind.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Holmesian_fallacy

Books heavier in critical thinking include espionage titles, detective novels and criminal profiler literature. Predict outcomes; adjust your model if your prediction fails. I think Sherlock knows a bit about chemistry and such as well.

There was a part in one of the books where Holmes talks about being careful about what you fill your head with.

I think that is the key

Ask Arthur Conan Doyle to write about you.

cocaine?