I believe the statisticians would call this heteroscedasticity. But meta-variety certainly easier to remember ;)

That's weird. Never heard the word heteroscedasticity before and now I see it in two different HN threads within the hour. (the other being https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19337466).

See further the Baader-Meinhof Effect. [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader%E2%80%93Meinhof_effec...

I thought that too, initially, but consider: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=heteroscedasticity&sort=byDate...

3 mentions in the same day out of a total of 8 mentions ever on HN (not including the 2 meta-comments). User dcomp noticed it also.

(oops, just bumped those numbers up one)

Meta-variety is like the variance of variances.

Heteroscedasticity is like changing variance.

Nice! I hadn't thought about that.

Right, so this is like having autocorrelation, right? Or at least having a confounding variable correlated to your error term?

Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean. But I think the answer is no.

Perhaps it shares a root with serendipity?

Both seem related to a kind of intelligent mindfulness.