Abduction is a useful intellectual tool.

You're likely already familiar with induction and deduction. Abduction is their lesser-known cousin.

Abduction is looking at details and trying to surmise a broader explanatory hypothesis out of them.

Whereas induction and deduction are more about certainty, abduction is more about probability.

The type of reasoning Sherlock Holmes did is a good example of the technique.

A canonically strong intro is this old Ribbonfarm essay: Startups, Secrets, and Abductive Reasoning

Abduction helps you generate hypotheses that might be true, that you can then bet on and experiment with.

If your experiments and incremental investments in the bet turn out to have good returns, that gives you increasing confidence your hypothesis is correct.

Abduction can help you make bets in places where you don't have full certainty.