I actually think #2 is more of a hacker symptom rather than limited to the weird Lisp Programmers. Someone here put it fairly bluntly a while back in the form of a "How to tell if you're a hacker" quick quiz. At the end the answer was something like "If you intuitively tried to 'game' the test, you're probably a hacker. If you don't even know what that means, you're probably not one."

I think it's a useful skill to sharpen and definitely not limited to passing tests. There are diminishing returns to worry about for how much you want to try and game something, but having even a basic intuitive feel for it is pretty useful in "the real world".