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I'm not sure if I'm totally missing your point, or if you're making a point that's a distinction without a difference.
In Army basic training, there are two standards one must meet:
- height/weight, adjusted for age and gender
- PT test, which consists of push-ups, sit-ups, and a 2-mile run, with scoring adjusted for age and gender
Either one will get you chaptered out of the Army within certain timeframes. There is a lot of fine print for specific situations (basic training has some extra cushion), but that's the ground truth. These same principles apply to the military at large, but the standards and fine print differ.
I don't know how that squares with: "That doesn't mean they care about the height/weight."
In an organization so devoted to adherence to procedure, what the procedures are set up to be is often a pretty strong indicator of what the organization cares about...
As someone who's done the whole military thing (am I alone?), I agree with your view that most members of the rationalsphere would struggle immensely in bootcamp, both in turns of physicality and culture (I'm referring mostly to the Army and Marines here, which focus on actual combat training vs. the Air Force and Navy that don't).
I totally agree that you would have 0 problems (other than patience with the stupid parts) as you have a high degree of physical ability, emotional resilience, and general cognitive ability. You would very likely excel. I could say the same of Val and Pete, and I'm sure Eli would do well (I don't know the others you listed well enough to venture a guess).
I have never met Eliezer. However, I suspect he would struggle a great deal and be unlikely to succeed from what I've read and been told. I can't imagine Eliezer playing say football well either. My model of him just says he's simply not optimized for that kind of environment where his intellectual strengths would be limited and his weaknesses amplified. It's just not a remotely optimal environment for someone who is (according to my model of him) built like a race car, extreme performance within strict parameters (flat track, maintenance, etc.).
And that's okay. The military enlisted system at least typically focuses on taking both physical and intellectual generalists and training them to perform a specific job. It's all about the averages. The cockpit is decidedly not adjusted for individual needs or specialized performance for the vast majority of military personnel.
I do hope you're at least somewhat right about the long-term, increasing-marginal-returns sorts of gains, since that's my current strategy for achieving high impact on important matters.
Bootcamp (i.e. the military) cares very much about both losing sufficient weight to meet the standard as well as the ability to perform at a basic level of physical fitness. The different U.S. military services have differing standards, but the general requirements are all comparable.
In an environment where the food supply is tightly controlled and there is constant movement, people tend to lose a lot of weight quite rapidly.
However, if you don't meet the body proportion standards after a certain time, you will be separated from the military.
I'm just failing at being funny and probably succeeding at being cruel in reinforcing your recent in-person tendency to confuse the two laws (because it was hilarious in context, and I'm terrible).
Thanks for writing down the gears concept in detail.
Did you possibly mean to link to Godwin's Law instead of Goodhart's Law?