Arthur Conan Doyle, through Sherlock Holmes, said, once you've eliminated the impossible, what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
This tells me that Schlitz actually has psychic powers and Wiseman does not. It actually makes perfect sense. People who are psychic wouldn't be skeptics, and people who are not psychic certainly would be skeptics.
I suppose that, had Conan Doyle been aware of quantum mechanics, Sherlock Holmes would have spent a portion of every case entertaining the notion that quantum phenomena caused the universe to spontaneously arrange the crime scene.
Holmes was famously ignorant of any knowledge that didn’t help him solve crimes. In his own words:
“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. 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. 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.”
“But the Solar System!” I protested.
“What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.
Given this, I’m not sure Holmes would bother with a quantum viewpoint of the world, since the theory wouldn’t help him solve crimes.
My comment was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but if we're going to push our glasses up and engage in some good old well-actuallying, I'll note that Conan Doyle appears to have retconned Holmes' self-professed ignorance later on, as he calls on knowledge of astronomy to solve a case at least once: https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1993JBAA..103...30S
Perhaps the leading sentence by parent was not a true speculation, just an elaborate setup to the slightly altered quote as the punchline. In an alternate universe, if Conan Doyle took more interest in the digestive system of the human body, Sherlock Holmes would've explained everything with gut feelings instead of making extended retreats to his Mind Palace.
If you don't know it already, you might be interested in 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency' by Douglas Adams and/or the funnier second part 'The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul'.
> This tells me that Schlitz actually has psychic powers and Wiseman does not.
This sounds like fertile ground for further research. What are the boundaries of these powers? In what circumstances do they work, and when do they not? What if the trial participants had all been greeted by a 3rd person, not Schiltz himself? What if he were wearing gloves, or a hat, during the trial? What if the participants were?
I'm not making fun- wouldn't such experiments go towards discovering how such observed powers work?
> This tells me that Schlitz actually has psychic powers and Wiseman does not. It actually makes perfect sense.
Or that exposure to Schlitz's and Wiseman's pheromones activate/deactivate subjects' psychic powers respectively.
> People who are psychic wouldn't be skeptics, and people who are not psychic certainly would be skeptics.
Skeptics and psychics spontaneously form self reinforcing social groups! Blah blah gender of researchers affecting mouse studies blah blah women's menstrual cycles sync up in small communities blah blah metronomes blah blah spooky action at a distance blah blah many worlds blah.
This tells me that Schlitz actually has psychic powers and Wiseman does not. It actually makes perfect sense. People who are psychic wouldn't be skeptics, and people who are not psychic certainly would be skeptics.