It sounds like this philosophy boils down to “Your excuse is orders of magnitude more reasonable if it can be characterized as an example of a reasonable, general principle.”. That notion is immediately agreeable to me, and it seems obviously true. But I wonder how widely held that opinion is.
Is this principle rooted in the same part of our brains that thinks that class List<Foo> is elegant and class FooList is ugly? Dealing with specifics is dirty and it means you don’t really understand the problem space. The more you generalize your edge cases, the easier it is to convince yourself and others that you are being reasonable. I think this way every day.
But are there people out there who don’t think like this? And if so, do they use Beeminder? And if not, do you care? I wonder!