Funnily enough, just yesterday I read Steven Pinker heaping paragraph upon paragraph of scorn on writers keep hedging with claims like "I think". 

The third paragraph is a thing of beauty.

: )
Glad to hear this! I'd be gratified if you shared any further updates. 

My knree jerk reaction is to try something really new and weird, like, yell at the full moon. Or post something so incendiary it goes viral - like approving something everyone hates. Or to directly email Taylor Swift's agency and ask them if she's looking for a new music video director (I don't know any of her songs, hence why it is radically novel). None of that is likely to work though, it's just quota-filling, being new for the sake of being new.

In my experience, it is mostly quota filling for big, persistent problems. Most of the things I tried for my migraines and procrastination worked partially at best. But if you do enough of them, you will stumble on a solution. (Maybe multiple solutions you need to stack, but if it works, it works.) You couldn't have guessed beforehand that it would work. If you could, your problem would have been solved long ago.

And if you keep trying one new thing a day, let alone for a particular problem, you will go through so many ideas that you'll hit on a success even if the odds are 1 in a hundred.

Also, if you can't come up with any ideas that look good to you, but you can't just quit, then it is time to lower your filters and do something weird. Babble more and prune less. 

EDIT: That said, a lot of my problems aren't something I've seriously tried to solve before. Either because they're new or because I'm lazy. These problems are often resolved on the first serious try.

Those make sense. I note they're not just simple lines in a space of ideas, but use a wider gamut of the senses than I was aiming for. Probably, the sort of shapes I was going for are in an unhappy middle ground. Too impoverished compared to the senses, too rich compared to the austerity of diagrams in category theory. So this post should have been about the images different proof methods bring to mind.

Nailing down what's wrong specifically is part of my issue. 

I do recommend my approach, though.  Losing is part of playing, and shouldn't affect one's ego in either direction.  The puzzle of how to maximize the overall outcome of the sequence of games in life remains fascinating and worth pursuing.

Your approach is clearly good. But the trouble is, how do I deal with Bruce? 

Nah, this is definitely a thing. I'm often scared to try winning because I fear my best efforts will not be good enough. Like, I'm effectively following the adage "better not to risk failure than to act and remove all doubt". Well, some of the time. So when I read about the need to lose, or your "inner Bruce", in Stuck In The Middle With Bruce, it resonated with me. 

And yeah, that's obviously not what good gamers do. But what made you think I'm talking about good gamers? Or even about most people? 

I think this is the best story you've ever written. It's in that place which is beautiful to us on the cusp of becoming a horror, a comedy, a tragedy but resisting that huge tension to be more. 

EDIT: you've written to date. The best is yet to come.

Edited this response. Previous version didn't convey all of what I meant and felt vague to me upon re-reading it.

Yeah, the main thing people care about at a far/large scale isn't what their feeds are like. And that's a big part of any discourse about social media. But wrt. the near/small scale, I think people mainly care about "why am I getting so much slop/engagement bait?" That latter perspective is what I was focused on. 

Nonetheless, many people must've read the title and (reasonably) assumed I meant the far/large scale. So the title was misleading. My bad.