@dboing said in #23:
>In chess there are no definitive answers only hypotheses (while at making claims or opinions)
@Akbar2thegreat said in #26:
> There are but it depends on context.
A consequence without explicit condition, is an orphan statement of some kind. So in itself, it is not definitive. what is, on the other hand, is the pair of the statement AND its context set or boundary if in a connected kind of bigger context (....in position space). That could have definite truth quality of the logical kind..
This means don't crumble if an old working thumb rule of chess just did not work like it were... you just have discovered some territory outside of its rarely given context. But maybe sometimes, even the statement only has limiter historical context breadth, when it was discovered as hypothesis found applying in that breadth (or community experience set).
Ok, I feel like i am not reaching much audience. consider this my first public iteration building on your comment to look back at chess theory ups and downs and the current new stances about it.
Impatience with improvement might be a psychological factor too.. People not curious about understanding but impatient to prove themselves winners and better competitors first, whatever it takes.
But that is not really why there are new stances, just likely an amplifying factor. The "it does not work anymore" factor: "why should i be concerned..."
No the rational, even non-competition obsessed, perspective have shown that the body of experience set has unveiled "holes" in how the theory, which has principle status then applies now (thumb rules for limited experience players, now).
I should say, i may take a claiming tone, it is just to give the arguments or hypotheses of mine their best chance, but i am in discovery mode allways.
Why principles of chess theory having some hard time nowadays, in some expert player population at least?
It is not their inherent flaws, it is the community shared awareness about including top elite recorded games, shows the contextes where they don't apply anymore.. The knee jerk reaction from those, who, btw, did not need those principles anyway and anymore, is "why bother remembering those.." AND then in a sort of simplistic projection of current self chess thinking patterns to all learners:
"you don't need them either, look at me, I don't use them anymore; they must have been useless even in my past".
In reality, they may even be impediments to them, in fast time controls, or any time control faster than no time control..
I am not saying time controls are bad.. just that fast means intuition is more important, and conscious reasoning is very slow. having distractions about thumb rule getting in the way? not good!
But it is not the best conclusion, it just drops the baby with the bathwater out the window (baby theory, a good theory should allow for new data to feedback upon it, if it were a scientific theory like in physics).
We just have to have a taste for abstractions and trust our own logic. Is it really the princples that are useless, or their blind generalization to any position, even those that were not being explored at all by the recorded chess community history. From a the time of the conception of these abstractions, by authors intersecting chess expertise of the time, with abstraction construction and communication, and made its way through to today. For them as authors it was the complete chess space they were talking about. Since chess is big and we have no measure of even current knowledge completeness, they inferred from the assumption of common sense, why specify context... the context is our context, and perhaps ego helping (that may happen, you know in chess culture), we know it all of chess..
So now today, we also think that chess opening is done deal... or that the Tree is known completely. something like that.. plus we have the truth of the engine... TB... chess is not to be discovered anymore, it is just about individual performance.
Well, i am a doubt machine.... I hope that the above is just a caricature from my silly mind. I think if the scientific attitude that we had in physics with regard to empirical worl and theory building and constanlty revising with commotions (well there might have been, but the wheel has never stopped).. we are lucky. Chess is even more controllable that the typical phenomena that physics restricts its statements to..
Thank you for your reply. I gives me opportunity to spill more of my guts... this has been simmering. and your wise statement an enabler.. Don't regret it now. exhausted.. hope i did not lose the point: "it is the context!" that changes... offering new data... where has the theory building people gone?
