Short and Sweet: Words about Words.
Submitted by
on Sun, 10/25/2009 at 9:32am.
Internet, Overstatement, and You.
by meniscus
Sometimes I will intentionally edit a direct, concise sentence if only to make it long, tedious reading filled with tangents and simple embellishment, and I was wondering why it is that I do this. After thinking about it, I know that I had never done this in speech or written language classes in my youth. Finally I isolated where I'd picked up this inclination to explain: college logic classes.
In these classes, you go through grunt work, just like math. At first, you learn symbolic proofing technique mostly. Also, you memorize boolean logic principles. These are the infallible fundamentals, and they're applicable to nearly any problematic situation. They are used in many ways... Logic itself is used for two purposes in this message, albeit ironically.
It's both an excuse given for reason as to why I over-explain and over-embellish my articles, messages, blogs, etc: it's an old habit. It's also used to explain why some things aren't as they seem, but more on that later. After discussing overstatement, I'll show how sometimes logic can be used to say some really stupid but true sentences to throw readers (of a given argument) off.
I rarely do things to annoy anyone, but I find that saying what you could say in 10 words by using 10000 can be both a waste of time and a worthwhile, difficult challenge to proofread! That said, I'm not proofreading this...this isn't a long enough post to deserve such treatment.. :D All typos are for this reason.
Logic class, not logic itself,is the apparent source of my fascination with heavy sentences, but I think the knowledge itself is a great asset that can enlighten anyone to both techniques and insights into the mechanics of language, among other things. Some favorite concepts I've been made aware of are counter-intuitive, contradictory or anomalous in one way or another. Much like amazing chess positions, they are beautiful in a way.
Since I'm talking about my overstatement and where it came from, I'll present a strange question now. Later, after your eyes and brain have been duly tortured by an inconsistent but slow pace toward the end of this blog, I'll give the answer. I promise to include at least a solid portion of the following to unnecessarily long ways of saying things, of course. It wouldn't be prudent to do otherwise.
- Here's a question (from a logical concept) that I often propose: what is the shared quality between the concepts below (black txt)? Are they simple words, or is there some interesting way that they work? Take Rare and Common. They mean quite the opposite of each other, but can be relative, of course. One idea is more common, rare, or ambiguous, etc than another. Here's four such "quantifiers", as they are referred to in logic.
- rare
- common
- unique
- indistinguishable
The Question again: what property (or lack thereof) do these have in common? There may be many, but one is rather counter-intuitive.
I didn't major in Philosophy, but I managed to make it through the senior logic classes without informing the professor that I was only taking it for fun. Not at first, but I completed the course only out of personal interest, not useful college credit. No one would have suspected this. The concepts and especially the problems aren't for the easily distracted or undetermined student, so they assume everyone is a Phil major if they're in senior Phil classes.
It was a then new-found interest in chess, cigars, or both that provided the catalyst for my sudden interest in logic. It certainly wasn't the will to achieve nor the persuit of a useful degree, as I later discovered.
When I was a naive kid, although still too young to do so, I would go to a shop to buy cigars (and imported cigarettes) whenever I could. I was just "getting into" chess, and the cigar shop sold Staunton and other upscale chess sets. The clerk--if I remember correctly--was a Philosophy student who happened to be rated around 1700. We'd play blitz and talk about everything: arts, invention, culture, and a whole slew of abstract concepts he'd learned about in philosophy courses.
At the time I was a "student" of Sam Palatnik, who lived in Nashville with his family. My high school had no chess club, so I had started an informal one. I was playing very low quality tactics, coffeehouse chess, and winning. That is, until I went to the chess center and met the tournament players and GM Palatnik. I went to a handful of scholastic tournaments during that time, and I played blitz whenever I could. I probably didn't need the expensive GM lessons. I knew literally nothing. A 1600 elo coach would have been sufficient, and probably 1/3rd the price, but I didn't know that.
I just expected to get good without study...as if a master could simply tell you how to play chess... and you would magically improve. I faked being "good at chess". I could play and explain the Ruy Lopez and French advanced variation well because I had seen it used by other players, and one opening or the other showed up in most games with my dad. Still, at that point chess was just another thing that I liked. It's another story, chess, but to sum it up: After a year, I had gotten to around 1400-1500 USCF from my original 1100 strength, although that's because my dad and I were very competitive which each other. The lessons I needed weren't going to be on the lesson plan that a GM might have, those lesson helped probably no more than a normal coach's lesson would have. I continued for quite a while, but I eventually decided against continuing when he raised his rates on his students. These are just your ordinary specifics: the whys and hows. Moving on... Chess interest had me constantly seeking quality opponents, and the cigar shop was one of the only places I could get an OTB game.
The clerk of the cigar shop, let's call him Ben, somehow convinced me that I wanted to study philosophy. I always had an interest in language mechanics, and all the useless contradictions and anomalies that he presented were the important knowledge of every college student, as far i was concerned. How one could make a living by collecting useless but interesting information, I didn't know. I was interested immediately, since I was already a veteran of collecting strange facts on my own. I moved out of the house and enrolled in college. I never declared a major in philosophy because I didn't see the point in anything honestly, as I was playing more and more. It's true that for 7 years, I would be a musician, but I didn't yet know that.
I didn't end up ever declaring a major in philopsophy, but I made the trip to the dept. anyway for the most interesting classes that I have taken to date, elementary, symbolic, and quantified logic.
Logic class. It's my excuse for developing a habit of choosing intentionally misleading adjectives. It's where everything was embellished beyond all necessity so that we could become fluent at simplification (decomposition) of the crucial elements and verify proof. To identify that only valid processes take place, one must undergo transposition and isolation of a number of statements. They must deduce what, if any, function is implied. That can be tedious for some, but for us it was more often just funny sentences that obviously sounded like they were denying a point, but they actually were confirming it, and things such as this.
Logic isn't boring, really. It's not like isolating numeric variables in math. It's somewhat similar to any other system of logic, but way more fundamental. You can't see any other general math principles, except the ones you learn in Geometry class, which are very similar to the basics.
Similarly, and perhaps to the interest of chess players who may be reading, you can use logical reduction to deduct the elements of a chess position. Chess and logic are more like word calculus more than arithmetic/mathematics. They are their own system of logic with their own languages. A grasp of either takes work and practice to develop. Critical factors or conditions in a variation can be disguised in the way that keys to any solution in logic are, by deception, decoy and misdirection. For example, a change in pawn structure may affect king safety but also by illusion or oversight, not appear to not exist currently. Like solving geometry proofs in fewer steps, it requires insight,skill, and common sense--certain things obviously affect the premises/givens and conclusions (soundness of a variation), to discover these subtleties. Other factors, sometimes apparently important ones, are not essential and are distractions to the solver. That, or they are "moot points"--pieces of situationally irrelevant information.
As you gain experience, you see clues more deeply hidden within an argument (chess position). The result is that you isolate important elements of the argument and gain perspective on the implications they have on the big picture. In chess, you might gain the skill of, say, calculating sharp possibilities to refute or dismiss a critical sideline that you otherwise would not, but you only do this because you have gained the ability to notice more subtle or distant conditions. This develops an intuition to discover (and skill to calculate the consequences of) a contradicting argument early (or to notice a future zwischenzung checking of your king).
The important parts of an argument, for difficulty and education's sake, are almost always are interwoven with superfluous, if misleading and apparently contradicting statements designed to challenge the student's ability to identify what information is relevant. That's the crucial task when solving any problem. Many times in class, a student would claim an argument contained contradiction only to be shown that, when reduced, the argument simply confirmed the same thing twice, but in such a way that when written in english, deceived the reader into identifying something incorrectly--usually, a phrase that only seems to assert something.
To, as promised, use blatant over-explanation to over-explain the previously explained tendency toward over-explanation:
In logic, students unravel overly wordy, oft-deceptive statements in a sometimes hopeless effort to filter out what transpositions and operations allow the conclusion to follow from the premise. It can be cruel to a reader, but it isn't always done to annoy or simply for self amusement. Sometimes, at least by me, it's just a habit. Forgive me for restating a premise, or don't. It's just a habit. It's Just A Habit. It's just a habit.
[insert habit confirming redundancy here]
A more simple, more readable statement that makes a good point about logic may not currently present itself to your author, but if it did, it wouldn't go something like this:
It's decidedly obvious that logic can or could certainly be described well and in adequately colorful and diverse words and ways, including (but not limited to) those situations where said words are playfully used in ordinary metered verse, such as song or sonnet, by any adjective that is both synonymous with useful and that conforms to the meter/rhyme format in question, should it exist, as well as by those lacking form that one might call free verse descriptions of said topic. Can this famed knowledge of logic be less of an overwhelming misuse of modification and property than it may appear to the reader to be, or could it ever constitute the saving assistance to overcome traumatic conditions to students, say, in the case that one were ever suddenly deprived of the knowledge, technique, or other skills, acquired tools necessary for the execution of the traditional communication methods, namely vocalization of meaning using one's assimilated vocabulary collected via an ordinary aptitude in linguistic education, described here as hypothetically AWOL? If said unlucky if inadvertently uncommunicative person were surprisingly able to retain their grasp of logic alone, I would venture an assumption that it is to great benefit of he or she, and would claim that they may still possess a process which effectively might serve as a tool that could sufficiently compensate for and the absence of the aforementioned disability caused by a hypothetical loss of these communication skills. That is the one way of saying it. Another is my opinion, but it's strong enough to not simply assume that this is the case but rather to also hasten to affirm--thorough this tireless continuation of what hopefully remains an ironic and pertinent example--an assurance to the reader: Yes, It can. The concise, simple, and a long awaited answer is Yes. Maybe you are, or should be, at this moment contemplating if you are or if you are not seriously dreaming up an unrelated or partially related situational mishap or parallel scenario in which logic could assist you. Hopefully you at least being creative by applying it to a hypothetical situation of your own design, and if doing so is further distracting yourself from the intentional pointlessness of your author's lengthening of this otherwise narrow topic on which the current paragraph focuses on, then so be it, since the entirety of said message is given simply to illustrate a valid point in an ironic way: the fundamentals of logic are useful knowledge.
I by no means suggest similarity in the nature of effective argument decomposition and analysis to the nature of this descriptive text. These additions, which contain are easily ignored, removed by a skilled logic student or experienced proofreader, are rather an elementary inflation of the readers task that have little or no contextual relevance to the point. So long as such a distraction only causes inconvenience and doesn't alter the syntax nor inherent meaning, it safe to dismiss. As often as it denotes an emotion, opinion, or desire of the author, this usually is nothing more than the mere addition of such easily composed fragments as prepositional phrases, appositives, or other grammatical devices, although here they risk the status of cliche since they are overwhelmingly introduced by similar means, they are easily improvised additions of irrelevent information. There are ways to frame such unpopular parts of speech that deceive the unwary into extracting non-existant boolean value from even these ambiguous things when used in logic...for lack of a term, what I'm using, I'll call "Syllable Quantity Expansion Implants". In logic, however, the extended arguments will be conceal any lack of necessity, not proclaim it. If they may appear, they are perhaps rephrased and presented in multiple ways that require steps to reduce/simplify, making the path to a solution more difficult to ascertain or the key to doing so less obvious.
You will witness that this point, which (again) is probably just as (if not more) interesting when communicated using shorter, more effective sentences, is being, shall now be altered into basic vehicle to express an absurdity in pointlessness that does nothing more than explain its own purposes or lack thereof while pointing out it's status of being overfilled with useless modification of itself to such an extent that it compels me to end the current paragraph. It is therefore time to take action by adding punctuation to it's final, most attractive, word. I'm going to try ending with a period, but not a question mark. Isn't that how clear statements are supposed to end?
Although it's against my better judgment to allow a "dirty" synopsis into this area of a written work, I admit that I want to say it simply, in case you couldn't (or wouldn't) read the above.
Basically, logic teaches one to verify whether or not an argument is valid. Validity means that a premise's truth would affirm the conclusion. Validity is only descriptive of the argument's syntax, meaning it has no errors or contradiction. There are usually many routes to show proof of validity in an argument. The core reason for analysis of a complex argument is to simplify it. Then any statements that aren't affirmed by a premise will be isolated, and unless they deny a premise, they won't be included in any proof of this validity.
Like everything else, I should make a rhyming one-liner to encourage readers, especially any current logic students. How's this one:
The more skill that's acquired, the less that's work required.
[If you were wondering (and of course you were...), the above line is best accompanied by music in the key of B-flat.]
I eventually jettisoned the idea to pursue a philosophy degree. I realized that learning such skills could be done on my own time and for much less money. If you're in a philosophy program, it is likely that you want to teach at the same concepts to your own students at college or that you hope to write a book, most likely a textbook.... on philosophy. From my own experiences I can only contemplate one other likelihood: you want to work in a cigar shop. Still, I liked logic, so I took the harder, quantified version.
It was in this second, more complicated, quantified logic class in which the use of properties and their own function became essential to proofs, and that's why I'm interested in the question I posed at the onset of this madness. Rather than make another excuse for a long description of the benefits of another class, which discussed much more interesting ideas, I'll get to the point. One property that a modifier can have is reflexivity, and it becomes reflexive if it applies to itself,obviously. The list of modifiers above do not display this common trait. So what of a modifier that is non reflexive, yet it describes a specific condition? Usually, its opposite best describes its property! The meaning of one displays the property of the other? Yes! I've always found that poetic, and it shows up again and again in my rants and generally whenever I get the urge. An easily given example is that of rare and common. Rareness IS common.
The jist is this: every item is unique on the planet. Natural rareness, or uniqueness even, is in fact common or ordinary and vice-versa.
Reflexives aren't quite so interesting, to say the least, which gives new meaning to the fact that boredom is boring. It's boring because boredom is reflexive, but it's also obvious. Well, it's more boring to me, especially when compared with nonreflexives. Pain is painful, etc. Yawn. The quantifiers I had questioned at the onset of this marathon are interesting in my opinion only because they do NOT describe themselves.
And that's that! Well done, reader. Now, a few more words to wrap things up:
Every strange or unusual sentence that people decide to type on the internet is only taken as such in context, so I'm reminding people that strangeness is not strange. The unique purposes and word choice of an individual's words are almost always different than others' are. Those are the usual oddities. Indeed, It is very rare indeed to mistake one 'unique' thing for another without intentional deception at play.
Uniqueness in chess:
Chess games are unique by time limit, location, date, and skill levels of players-- even when the same moves are played, and so it follows that the more in common two games have the rarer and rarer examples become!
Everyone is normal when online, but writing, most likely, in different quantity, tone and length than they would speak in face-to-face conversation. Like you, most user-ID's don't speak out loud, saying every word they type. Librarians wouldn't abide by your use of thier computers if that were the case. Although I spent a long time joking and twisting words, I eventually did well in logic as I began persuing the skill of quickly and logically dissecting arguments.
This instilled in myself a tendency to use the very same passive and over-descriptive language in composition, and that's a good excuse, I hope.
You can't, in practical situations, say every thought that's in your head, but when you're typing, only you decide when to quit: there is no one on the other end of the phone.
It's just not fun to write directly anymore. For readers, reading 2 pages between a subject and verb is not only annoying, but it can be torture. That's not my fault, and I'm not trying to sell books, anyway. I've been criticized as dry plenty of times, but I can only offer explanation, since I know they'd prefer a shorter piece in most cases. Everyone knows this... There's only a million phrases of the common English teacher that sum it up, such as:
Less is more. To the point. Clear and concise.
or axioms like this: "He who uses the fewest words, wins"
I respectfully disagree.
Thanks for reading.
Tim
Appended example of "chatter" in an argument:
"There isn't a time when I haven't disregarded the number of people that couldn't be ones that I won't ever fail to meet, and that fact has a way of being forgotten. In fact, I've never remembered if I had or hadn't thought of it just now or in a previous thought."
Can take a minute to simplify, but it also becomes obvious that simplification is the principle task.
Conversely, important statements sometimes are made to appear as such chatter. These are all true and have no bearing on anything else in an argument. I'll show now how chatter can logically added to a premise. Try to isolate the true statement from these compound statements (where connotation most often fools the reader of an argument). Logical proof is deductive, so beware of any inferential statement in logic... it is a roadblock that you must ignore, like general principles in chess that cause the player to play natural (and bad) moves. Try to isolate what is essential, if you can.
If we don't discover the date on which the world will end, John will fold underwear. If not A, then B
If we can't figure out the global termination date, John will NOT fold any underwear, ever. If not A, then not B
Assuming both are true, you can deduce that A is true. It's not hard to see when put next to each other in symbolic form (bold text).
All of these follow from the premise that we we will discover the "enddate". Here's the proof.
Given: A is true.
we will discover the end of the world's date (premise).
addition: if one part is true, use of the operator "OR" makes entire sentence true, therefore any sentence indicating that either premise or anything else is true represents a vaild argument, regardless of soundness.
- therefore these both are true
Either we'll find the end date, or John Will do underwear.
Either we'll find the end date, or John Won't do underwear.
- because the premise is true, we obtain a valid compound sentence of our liking.
- "either X or Y is true" is an equivalent to "either Y or X is true"
- If a compound is operated by "AND", both parts are true. but if operated by "OR", one part being false makes the other true [modus tollens from simple logic]. one part of a compound "or" statement sentence being denied automatically confirms the other. This allows a conditional statement ("If then") to be formed by transpositit is misleading when said in english: it sounds prescriptive and binding, but is merely a hypothetical situation! take an established "or" statement. Quickly: "Either A or B is true" has the same meaning as "If A is false, then B is true". Clearly.
John will do underwear or we will find the end date
now, more obvious chatter would appear as:
Johns mom will steal his girlfriends undies twice or we find the end date
or by not emphasizing the operator "OR", it can sound more like ultimatum or impersonal expression than statement, and logic doesn't do use either, so it's pointless chatter, again:
'we'll find the date, or john will do my underwear"
it's chatter because all statements related to underwear have nothing to do with the premise, although they're valid statements. They're decoys, to use a tactical term, of the problem you're solving.
- chatter presents a reoccurring challenge to the new logic student. The use of hypothetical statements are valid but misleading. they appear important and are usually presented in a way that sounds more pertinent, but when the compounds are separated (when possible), only one part of the statement is useful or necessary to the proof. although we can accurately say "if the premise isn't true, then anything we say here is true [insert whatever you want--If the premise isn't true, I'll beat kasparov] is a valid statement, it's useful to remember that you can only add chatter BECAUSE you know that the premise is true. Therefore, it's a fancy, normal sounding way of saying "If truth isn't true, then everything both will AND wont happen. In other words, it says "if you say this, we have a contradiction". it's accurate and doesn't invalidate an argument unless it is affirmed, which is why it happens with conditionals and the "OR" operator so often: the compounds created only require some truth value to be true.all such statements contain words to draw you into to their meaning, but no matter what the words are, if it uses a contradiction, however well-disguised, anything becomes true.
If john doesn't do underwear, we'll find enddate.
If we don't find out when it happens, John will eat your knights before your bishops.
so much on chatter. On logical concepts of validity, contradiction, soundness. The use of deception (chatter) provides practical problems for the student to overcome.
validity and invalidity tend to be viewed as a affirming soundness and unsoundness, especially when something sounds intentionally OBVIOUS or ABSURD. such extremes should be clues, and should raise the question...
is there a conditional here that results in a false value for A, our premise? If so, it can be deduced that either a: x is false when if the argument is valid or b: if one can find X to be true, the argument is or contains an invalidating contradiction.
contradictions do exist in reality, so yes, they can be sound- at least according to my professor's opinion. many parts of an argument are purposefully designed to seem contradictory or simulate assertion of truth value. since all conditionals are simply "OR" questions in another form, don't be fooled into forgetting that while not invalidating, these kinds of compounds RARELY give any new useful information, since the premise makes them true in any case. They are only usefull to misguide people or to practice transposition of conditional to compound and vice versa [to support something such as modus ponens/tollens]
another more difficult trick is when the words "and" , "or" are implied without being used directly. usually it will happen when a phrase contains the words "in the case that" or "provided that not". They can even be split by adding useless descriptors, as in "Provided constantly and to my dismay that...". Like tactics, they are well hidden or split from their neihbors by inserted adjectives and modifying phrases that should be separated by commas, as the one that finishes this statement is.
A conditional setup , "If not A", that would require a premise to be false, again, implies that any resulting statement's claim is true. While invalid in usage, it's not invalidating. That's how "OR" statements work. The operator OR forces one or the other statement to have truth. That means it confirms the statement, but it doesn't change except by appearance when negative modification is introduced, meaning that If it the statement reads "this is false" to throw you off, the truth value of it being false is just creatively confirmed by the premise. many a decoy in problems are clever, especially in legal contracts. a contradictory claim can be made, but it doesn't invalidate anything, so long as it remains hypothetical
this is highly different than a conditional that results in the premise A's truth being in question. it just doesn't mean anything new, once again. any condition that results in any premise's being false is simply assertion that the opposite of what it claims must be true.
the moral: in any version, a conditional within the argument might seem to deduce Truth for another statement than a premise, but it is most likely a red herring, a decoy to distract you. They can only confirm false values in non premises. This can be useful as well, however. One can prove that a non-given statement isn't true by these means, if only to insert complete tangents into an argument for those susceptible to decoy.
Conversely, one can only confirm (in OR, if then, only if, etc operating sentences) the truth of a premise, which is usually a useless restatement), more accurately, the confirmation of a premise means that at least itself if not both statements are true. note that one cannot actually assert a non premised statement in this way. if a non premise is actually (beware of tricky words) confirmed as true or false by a premises' true value, there is a contradiction: the argument is invalid.
Remember the other tricky thing in reading syntax: soundness is mistaken for validity and vice-versa.
soundness is tested only by application of an argument.
When a valid argument corresponds to reality and has premises that are determined as true by observation, it is said to be sound when the conclusion is also true. If valid but, the premise and/or conclusion are not actually true, it's unsound. Relative values can be determined-- it can be more or less sound than an untested argument to the extent that premises are debated...
invalid arguments, strangely enough, can be made so by bad logic or contradiction. Unlike valid arguments, these can be unsound or sound. An invalid argument that is so by syntax error, etc is automatically unsound, but a contradiction can be both invalid and sound. They can be unsound too, but they can never be valid.
One can also use statements about an argument's validity to deduce what are necessary premises within the argument!
Example:
Statement: If X, then not A (premise: the date we'll be gone is known)
is another way of cloaking a descriptive characteristic which can be voiced as a conditional about the argument, specifically about the argument's validity, which is:
if X isn't false, then the argument is a contradiction.
suppose you didn't know the premise, and you were to trying to find a what must is required to be true for the validity of a proof. you'd make a connection to what invalidates the argument, and from there deduce what must be truth. such a clue stumped many a student...and there are many more than this. the clue I look for is the appearance of a descriptive statement that makes any claims about the argument itself.
Identifying what follows the supposition that claims about the argument are true can be used to reveal/deduce the key to the problem-- determining the truth of premises or of conditions which allow complex premises to be provable as true.
when one knows what is true, we can easily avoid basic contradictions that appear to prove everything true (remember the false premise means all other statements compounded with it are true). with premise in hand, an entire argument can be made, refined, and proven valid. w
finally, critical thinking in any logical process, including chess, can reveal when to make similar external observations to find clue to internal operations, and vice versa. externally, you may observe when an opponent is low on time, and decide that they are avoiding situations in which they need time. you can follow the clue, seeking simplification and are avoiding forcing variations, preferring ones with many choices/options/decisions, perhaps by playing surprising or unexpected choices yourself! in this way chances of accuracy are much greater with your time advantage.
Internally, you can notice the same thing and apply it to the external, final decisions you make. You may realize a pattern--let's say your opponent is playing to prevent you from something you haven't considered, which make apparent a new option or some options you then can then decide to pursue/explore. In certain types of positions, that is, when faced with choices, your opponents moves and/or body language may awaken you to any fact, such as the converse of the previous situaton--you are reminded that your clock is low, just in time to prevent your absent mind from losing by flag. More likely, they will just clue you into a good possibility that you hadn't considered yet by playing too passively against something you're not doing...yet.
In any process, as you improve your decisions will become more and more "logical". To close, One last application of logic to chess: I suspect that all logical thinkers in general, but here, the degree to which all chess players, beginners and masters possess at least a at least these two virtues:
the ability to ask the right questions about the process you're engaged in, be it chess, argument, math, etc--
And
the ability, resources, determination and technique to obtain the answers to the pertinent question
So what do you do? Work on both! Forwards and backward, I say.Sure, you've gotta have the questions to get answers, and you need to know spot the answers or their clues in order to know to ask a question. I never said it was easy :) It's a Catch 64--hehe.
Logic.It's usable in chess. That's all.
I'm burned out now. here's what I've said:
I overstate things.
Logic is interesting and useful, but its fundamentals are also solid and practically universal. I mean that they are basic laws that don't change, unlike chess positions. Logic should be used both to eliminate all but the most promising chess from your own play, but also focused on choosing the best situational factors. This isn't always position alone-avoiding variations where a time pressuredopponent has easy choices is a good example of a logical choice of strategy (if it's in your arsenal)
Just don't claim my reason, logic, as an excuse or your wordiness, chess.com users.Yeah, it sure is a valid excuse alright...and it's Taken!
FIN