Meta-ok and Meta-right

[jack]

I'm not sure if this is the best terminology, but I found it useful to have a name for the concept at all. I'd like one that was clear to people other than me :)

The idea is, "meta-right" means "the right decision given the information available, which may or may not have been correct omnisciently". Like:

Q. I put the colander in the utensils cupboard, was that right?
A. That was meta-right. [ie. it actually goes in the pan cupboard but I didn't expect you to know that, and thank you for helping tidy up, I'm glad you helped and took sensible guesses]

Q. I gambled on X, but it actually came up Y. Do you think that was meta-right?
A. I'm not sure, do you think you had any way to know, or was X your best guess?

Similarly, "meta-ok" when you ask if something is ok. Eg.

Q. Is it ok I was late home?
A. It was meta-ok.

Meaning, it's ok that you're late home SOMETIMES, and this time was no worse than any other time. But it's not necessarily ok if you're ALWAYS late home.

But is there a better way of describing this?

Comments

[simont]

Surely ‘meta-right’ would rapidly get co-opted as a veiled insult, along the lines of “Up to a point, Lord Copper”.

[redbird]

The problem with meta-right is that, at least in your first example, my reaction would be, depending on mood, "where do you keep it?" or "why aren't you answering the question?" Because "that was meta-right" could mean anything from "it actually goes in the pan cupboard" to "That is where I keep it, but I was leaving it out for a reason" and doesn't tell the person what you'd like them to do next time. (That's a best case, in which the person you're talking to has never lived with someone who passive-aggressively punished them for not being telepathic.)

And with the second, I would much rather know whether someone means "it was okay this time, but I'd rather it doesn't be a pattern" or "you didn't do anything wrong, but it turned out I really would have liked you home earlier, because I needed help with something."

They might be useful labels inside your head/for your own behavior, but I suspect they're not going to be very useful for communicating with other people. That's about how I feel about the word "over-reacting": it's sometimes okay to use reflexively, to tell myself or even other people "I think I am over-reacting here, maybe I should sit down and have something to eat" or to think that someone's reaction is probably about some other issue, but telling someone "you're over-reacting" is likely to make the situation worse whether or not it is in some sense a true statement because it is dismissive and asserts that the speaker is a better/more objective judge of the situation.

[andrewducker]

The word you are looking for is, I believe, "reasonable"

It was reasonable to put the colander in the utensils cupboard.
It was reasonable to come home late sometimes, but unreasonable to come home late every time.
It is reasonable to gamble on X if you have a way to predict its likelihood.

[rysmiel]

I would most likely go for "it made sense in context", I think, but "reasonable" works too.

(Also, they are doing weird esoteric stuff with our network at work at the moment, so it's possible IP logging me posting from work may give some odd results for the next bit.)

[andrewducker]

I don't log IPs. But I do enjoy knowing about things like that.

How esoteric are we talking? Have things gotten downright occult?

[rysmiel]

Sorry, that latter comment was directed at our host's journal helpfully warning that IPs were being logged on comments here rather than at you.

They sound pretty occult; I do not have enough Sanity Points at the moment to risk taking a closer look.

[andrewducker]

Oooh. I'm suddenly wishing that "Sanity Points" had caught on rather than "Spoons".

[jack]

I'm really sorry, I left IP logging on because it seemed like a reasonable default, mostly because it might be useful in identifying occasional troll comments, and I didn't think about it. It didn't occur to me that anyone I actually knew who already had a DW account would find it made much of a difference either way, since I already knew who they were.

I've no idea how a single IP would be recognisably odd, I assumed they would be recognisably in the same range or not. I'd be slightly curious to know, but only in abstract, it doesn't make any difference to me.

Do you think it's important I turn it off?

[rysmiel]

Oh, sorry, I really did not mean that as anything wanting apology from you; it was meant by way as a pre-emptive apology from me in case your dw logging did anything weird in the same way that, for example, Google went weird at work this morning, thought everyone from the entire institution I was working at was the same person and threw multiple captchas on every search any of us did because it thought we had a ridiculously high usage frequency for one address.

I'm totally good if this is not inconveniencing you; can our mutual apologies and so forth cancel out and leave us both OK here ?

[jack]

*hugs* OK, no worries, I'm glad it's ok. Sorry for worrying. That's really bizarre, I guess that would cause problems, but I don't think DW tries to do anything clever, it just remembers the IP in case it's needed later.

[jack]

Hm. That makes sense and is probably more understandable than my own attempts to explain. But to me "reasonable" sounds like "an understandable mistake" not "AA++++ success well done", does it sound like that to anyone else or is it just me?

[andrewducker]

But none of your examples sounds like "AA+++++ Well done" either, so I didn't realise you were going for that! They all sounded like "Well that could have been worse."

[jack]

Ah! Then that's helpful because I figured out I didn't really get across what I WAS going for.