To get good, go after the metagame

I'm struggling with this as well. Most of the qualities I had as a teenager like passion, drive, tenacity - in general a will to master difficult subject matter like science and technology for the betterment of humanity - let me down in the end. Here I am in my 40s, tired, broke, constantly reevaluating if I even want to do this anymore, and I keep reaching the same conclusion. I just don't know.

I'm deeply concerned that the world is rapidly rushing in a direction that I no longer believe in. While I'm sitting here tapping away at a keyboard, species are going extinct, wealth inequality is reaching a point of no return, people are being marginalized to the point of slavery.. there are so many indicators that we are headed towards disaster that I almost can't bear it anymore.

Im really trying not to be negative so I want to paint a portrait of how I thought the world would be today. When the Berlin wall fell in 1989, my friends and I (who were about 12 at the time) were already keenly aware of how messed up the world was. We grew up with AIDS and the war on drugs, gas guzzling cars, the military industrial complex out of control, deforestation and desertification, all the same problems as today. So we had hoped that maybe after the wall fell that the world would finally begin to deescalate the arms race. Maybe we'd starting getting solar panels on our roofs, maybe they'd cure AIDS and legalize drugs. During adolescence, we hoped that things would start going right for us for a change. And the 90s were epic, the internet came out, music got good, counterculture seemed to be rising with the WTO protests and similar movements.

But then the dot bomb and 9/11 happened and the rest is history. We've regressed into a neofascist authoritarian culture driven by fear and mistrust. The few glimmers of hope like CRISPR and legalized weed and cheap solar panels and lithium iron phosphate batteries are great and everything, but from my perspective this has all been too long coming. Now we have insurmountable threats like all reefs dying by 2050 due to ocean acidification and temperature rise, which will lead to half a billion people from pacific island nations being displaced into southeast Asia when their supply of fish runs out and potentially world war III. And everywhere we look, the news along those lines is pretty grim.

Ok back on track to positivity: what could/should have happened is that when Clinton was elected, had he been more progressive and less moderate, we could have deescalated the arms race. We could have chosen diplomacy and financial assistance to eastern Europe and prevented the wholesale slaughter that happened as the USSR was diced up and claimed by strongmen. We could have used the money to pay off the national debt completely under the next president, maybe Al Gore, who would not have allowed Who Killed the Electric Car to happen. The tightening of the purse strings might not have happened, so the dot bomb could have been avoided. The housing bubble never would have happened. Instead we could be building sustainably by now with hempcrete and be using switchgrass and algae for biofuels. Instead of this race to the bottom marginalization of tech workers for the service economy, we could have had coops and democracy in the workplace like in Germany. We could have an automated industrial manufacturing base in the US bigger than China that would provide a UBI for everyone. We could have stopped cutting NASA off at the knees and perhaps had a SpaceX level of reusability in the public sector.

I guess writing this is a catharsis since nobody will read it. I'm trying to live and work the way I would have in 2000 had I known what I know now. But it's hard when the world has digressed so far from what it could have been that people don't really understand where I'm coming from anymore. We're so distracted with living under the realities of this local maximum that we can't see beyond it to what could be. So I guess at this point I will try to write more about what's possible because I don't really know what else to do.

By my definition it's meta to do opponent modeling since you are using information outside of the game mechanics.

And you're right, for games with high efficiency and public knowledge you can often just grind through optimal play.

However, for games with hidden information, you can play theoretical optimally, but you can also gain an additional edge if you can properly model your opponent. I'm thinking like in Poker. There's mathematically correct play, but because you play against folks who don't play mathematically correct you could get an extra edge by properly modeling the faults of your opponent you can exploit!

So chasing the latest LoL champion of the month is bad. That makes sense. But at what level does it pay off to take advantage of the meta changing, and change your main from time to time to adjust?

I would say players around the border of silver and gold would benefit by paying attention to the meta.

In chess I can often win with dubious gambits against players of relatively equal skill, but this would not be true in higher levels of play. In this case going 'off-meta' has distinct advantages between opponents of equal but mediocre skill.

Thank you for taking the time to write this.