When you set out to solve a meta-problem what you are essentially saying is "I'm open to explore."

You have a starting point: a problem, a question, an opportunity. But you recognize that you don't know everything yet. That there may be a better problem, a more useful question, a bigger opportunity, just over the horizon.
 

So you decide to start with the meta-problem of looking for it. Your goal? Choosing which problem in problem-space you want to actually solve.
 

The language of math means we could define a neighborhood rigorously if we wanted to. The neighborhood of a problem would start from that point in problem-space and a distance measure to know how far afield we were willing to explore. In calculus this distance is represented by ε (the Greek lower-case epsilon). 

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More intuitively though, we can just use the idea of a neighborhood to guide us in our adventure. If you want to find that better problem, try tweaking anything you can imagine about your starting point and see what you learn.

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Understanding the problem neighborhood is just one part of the meta-problem cycle. You can also see illustrations of this idea in practice on the Examples page.