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In mesa-optimizers, "mesa-" is not actually a real prefix meaning the opposite of "meta-", illustrating the deceptiveness of those things.

You suspected something was off, but the prefix promised way too many capabilities and conveniences for you to question it.

edit: oops, see this

The paper version of Risks from Learned Optimization says

The word mesa has been proposed as the opposite of meta.[7]

(See also this comment by the first author.) The citation is:

Joe Cheal. What is the opposite of meta? ANLP Acuity Vol. 2. URL http://www.gwiznlp.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Whats-the-opposite-of-meta.pdf.

The cited paper says:

If meta is sometimes a direction what is the opposite direction? Surprisingly, it appears that there is no defined opposite to ‘meta’ in any philosophical system, NLP or otherwise. So let us propose one now.

... (read more)

2CstineSublime2mo

That is a surprising reading to me. I always assumed it was named for the very Roadrunner & Coyote looking hills with steep escarpments. It seems like it's real meaning is closer to the Greek adverb for things which are "in" (i.e. Mesangium, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica). Thus an optimizer within the range of the base model.

1Q Home2mo

Oops! Sorry, I ended up rediscovering America. [...] But I first encountered this reading in a Rob Miles' video. However, Rob's slides actually show that it's not valid Greek and the prefix literal meaning is different. (Though there's also some non-AI paper which conceptualizes meta/mesa as opposites.) But I forgot/didn't notice. And the original post does point out the prefix' literal meaning too. When I googled around before making the shortform, I found this stackexchange post where people argue what should be the opposite of meta and this reddit post.