From Gwern’s Epigrams page: “‘thrift’ is achieving one’s goals as cost-effectively as possible and maximizing one’s bang-for-buck; ‘frugality’ is choosing one’s goals to be as cost-effective as possible, and picking a bang which minimizes one’s buck. The former is a virtue; the latter, a vice.”
I would not describe the latter as a vice when the form of ‘picking a bang’ is internal alignment: rather than choosing your ‘real’ goals to be cost-effective, you are instead ‘realizing’ that you were acting on habits attached to some poorly-defined conception of what ‘should’ be your goal on some axis, and now aligning the part of you that was busy acting as though you cared, so that it no longer has to, and so that the cost of that action is no longer borne.
There are probably other cases, but I don’t feel like enumerating them right now. I’m tempted to write more because I ‘should’, but I’m picking the lower-cost temporary goal of entering a Shortform entry instead as a form of the above non-vicious frugality. Unfortunately, I’m probably not going to immediately get back to thinking about the more important thing I was just thinking about a few minutes ago; what’s more likely is that I’ll get distracted by something else, so the non-viciousness of the frugality is somewhat nullified by vice elsewhere.
From Gwern’s Epigrams page: “‘thrift’ is achieving one’s goals as cost-effectively as possible and maximizing one’s bang-for-buck; ‘frugality’ is choosing one’s goals to be as cost-effective as possible, and picking a bang which minimizes one’s buck. The former is a virtue; the latter, a vice.”
I would not describe the latter as a vice when the form of ‘picking a bang’ is internal alignment: rather than choosing your ‘real’ goals to be cost-effective, you are instead ‘realizing’ that you were acting on habits attached to some poorly-defined conception of what ‘should’ be your goal on some axis, and now aligning the part of you that was busy acting as though you cared, so that it no longer has to, and so that the cost of that action is no longer borne.
There are probably other cases, but I don’t feel like enumerating them right now. I’m tempted to write more because I ‘should’, but I’m picking the lower-cost temporary goal of entering a Shortform entry instead as a form of the above non-vicious frugality. Unfortunately, I’m probably not going to immediately get back to thinking about the more important thing I was just thinking about a few minutes ago; what’s more likely is that I’ll get distracted by something else, so the non-viciousness of the frugality is somewhat nullified by vice elsewhere.