this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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No Stupid Questions
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There is no such thing as a Stupid Question!
Don't be embarrassed of your curiosity; everyone has questions that they may feel uncomfortable asking certain people, so this place gives you a nice area not to be judged about asking it. Everyone here is willing to help.
- ex. How do I change oil
- ex. How to tie shoes
- ex. Can you cry underwater?
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Meta often means "one layer up," e.g. "metaphysics" is the way of the world that our mundane world is embedded in. A reader might remark that the book Gödel Escher Bach is "pretty meta," which might mean it breaks the 4th wall.
The opposite to meta is mesa. For instance, AI safety researchers sometimes talk about mesa-optimizers, meaning an optimizer which itself is optimised by another optimiser.
Facebook's metaverse is apparently misnamed -- seeing as it runs on computers which are in our own universe, it really ought to be called the mesaverse, and our physics are its metaphysics.
The Meta is a character in the hit internet series Red vs Blue.
Related, I always explained it as “narrative about,” as in a meta-narrative is about the narrative. Same difference as one layer up I suppose.
Is metanarrative the story of the story?
Something about grand metanarratives and postmodernism
Yeah you could apply the word to a story-in-a-story like The Princess Bride, which has a narrative about a boy hearing another story. The meta-narrative would be the story about the boy.
You don't need to get recursive with the layers of fiction though. If you imagine a long-running many-hundreds-of-episodes tv show, the show will likely be divided into a number of distinct arcs, perhaps season-by-season. Each arc will have its own narrative, its own story beats, its own themes; but all the arcs will be tied together by a metanarrative, a narrative encompassing the other narratives.
..or the metanareative can be the structure of the story itself.
Here's a few frequent ones (Kurt Vonnegut for more):
Someone ran into a set of problems and then solved them.
Some people met, overcame some stuff and then ended up together.
Things were bad and got better.
Things were bad and got worse.
A specific thing needed to be done and someone did it.