You don't really need concrete positions to discuss what gets considered as general go theory.

To take the relevant proverb, ponnuki is supposed to be worth 30 points. Of course you can find examples where ponnuki isn't worth 30 points, I however wouldn't consider those relevant enough to drop the proverb.

By the way, what your Go ranking?

If he has short-term memory loss it's of course also possible that such a move is intuitive.

When I say here liberties than I mean the amount of moves that it requires to capture a group. In a fight it's useful to have that number in mind. If you have a fight between two groups than the situation isn't really wide open like a Joseki.

Reading 10 moves ahead doesn't mean that you see every possible variation but one variation that includes reasonable moves from both players.

You don't want to spent time reading out the variance tree of a Joseki every time you play it from scratch. It's also not always straight forward to know what result is better. If it possible to start an invasion in the corner? To judge whether it's possible to invade a corner you might well have to read 20 moves deep. How much points is the influence really worth? Bad Joseki moves often only make you lose a single point.

Lastly learning Josekis is a way to learn how stones flow in the beginning of the game. You need a bit of a feeling of how a game flows to be able to read far ahead.

If you capture a stone and don't get an additional eye you probably not gaining a small advantage through that move but are doing an even exchange.

In the end game you are right that additional strength through more eyes doesn't really exist. In the middle game it however often does.

Beginner games are a bit different because beginners often overconcentrate their stones and then an added eye won't do any good.

Don't attack strength You don't try to kill every stone of your opponent. You only need a few points more in the end than your opponent. In discussions that translates into accepting some premises of your opponent for the sake of the argument.

Take the evolution debate. You probably won't convince a hard core Christian that God doesn't exist. If you however admit God's existence for the sake of the argument you can use it to make strong arguments:

The bible shows that God prefers evolutionary design over intelligent design. God ordered a flood to kill the majority of the human race because he selected some humans as having better traits then the other humans. God choose the Jewish people and ordered them to commit genocide on other human groups that he didn't like.

Seeing God's genocidal ambitions as his attempt of evolutionary design. Otherwise the morality of killing that many people is hard to explain and the Christian you are arguing with has the burden of providing a better justification for God's attempt at genocide.

You however have to know that a lot of go experts also usually spent less time on other task that can improve mental skills. Korean go professionals for example don't have a normal school education but instead spend that time of their life with learning go.

If you lose a stone in go (as opposed to sacrificing it), you aren't only losing territory but the group that captures your stone gets an eye. That eye gives the group strength that can be used to attack elsewhere.

In my experience judgement of shape becomes something that's more intuitive than based on principles. I don't think that a 10 kyu or a 15 kyu can effectively judge shape by learning the small set of principles of good shape.

Playing a move to weaken a group by taking away it's liberties is something that doesn't happens unconsciously. Trying to play move that have a side effect of weakening the weakest group of the enemy is a lot of what the middle game is about. Then the opponent is either forced to add an additional stone to the group to defend it or you can attack that group later when it becomes to weak.

Reading 10 moves into the future is also something that happens frequently in go.

http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ssi/lai_go_chinese_strategy.pdf is a fine report that deals with transfering Go concept to thinking about military strategy.

Strategy is about thinking "What should I do?", while rationality is about thinking "What should I believe?". I think the two questions are similar enough that one can transfer a lot of what David Lei writes.

In practice when the situation can be played out one usually plays it out till the opponent is convinced. There are however situations where you can't play it out.

Under Japanese rules certain local shapes are per definition dead when the game ends. Bent for in the Corner is one example. If there are nonremoveable ko threads on the board those shapes don't die in Chinese rules or other rule sets that require playing out.