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NihilCredo comments on Epistle to the New York Less Wrongians - Less Wrong
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I get the impression that you draw the distinction between 'hacking' and 'munchkining' as "They both work, but would the average guy think that it's clever or dismiss it as crazy / unfair / uncustomary?" Am I correct?
Not really. It involves the ability to do things that would make other people look at you funny, and a relentlessly optimizing attitude toward all of real life and not just computer science problems or particular locks. There may be something more to it, too. In any case Timothy Ferriss != John McCarthy (albeit McCarthy himself may also have the Munchkin-nature) and people who build championship Magic decks don't think in quite the same way as great programming hackers, though you can also be both.
So, new attempt:
Closer?
A hacker is just a satisficer that places little value on a norm or norms. A munchkin is an optimiser.
Removing one constraint allows a satisficer to achieve better results on all the other constraints; by contrast, an optimiser will violate as many constraints as it takes to get the best result on the optimised criterion.
I came back to ask a similar question. I would not call the issue of choosing cryonics more then a hack. I think it is the difference is that a hacker is often some one who has optimized well in a narrow area while a munchkin will look at the whole system and optimize it and constantly look for new rules to exploit. The difference I see EY drawing is one of local optimization verses global optimization(or at least an attempting to).