It makes sense, but I can’t entirely convince myself that it’s the best way to look at it. A gut feeling that something’s wrong—I cannot throw out the time from the equation.
Ad absurdum—I look at everything that I can do with my free time and decide nothing is worth paying $8 per hour. So what do I do? Maybe work, so I can get my $8 back. Yeah, that’s the idea.
I’m not convinced that it’s the best way to think about it.
It was done by Doyle himself. In 1898 he published two short stories—“The Lost Special” and “The Man with the Watches”, where “an amateur reasoner of some celebrity” participates in solving a crime mystery and fails. It was written after Doyle killed off Sherlock, so he is probably parodying the character—he was quite tired with him at the time.