Not to be snarky or pedantic, but you're describing a Heuristic, not a bias. On the other hand, Wisdom is in large part knowing what not to do as a starting point. It may be wrong, which would be in error, but a true bias probably not.
You're right about heuristics, but the relevant wiki page for bias is really "Cognitive Bias"[1] rather than "Statistical Bias".
Also Holmes is not a good example of a rationalist; his main ability comes from being a fictional protagonist. Holmes cannot be a much better source of rationality advice than Conan Doyle, who quite literally believed in fairies.
This is actually a very good comment. Some of these ideas are nested, logically. A Heuristic is not per-se biased, although a subset of heuristics is in fact associated with the origin of the term 'cognitive bias'. Viz,
Although much of the work of discovering heuristics in human decision-makers was done by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman,[4] the concept was originally introduced by Nobel laureate Herbert A. Simon. Gerd Gigerenzer focuses on how heuristics can be used to make judgments that are in principle accurate, rather than producing cognitive biases
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_bias Sherlock holmes: eliminate the impossible, and what is left, however improbable is the truth. &tc.