Good point. If I have to make an analogy it seems like putting a person not physically suited for the military into a strict military 10-day brutal survival bootcamp. They need to be more careful with this indeed.
I don't think this kind of training permanently injures them, nor did I feel that was implied by the parent comment. I do think this kind of training, which pushes them to physical and mental limits, helps prepare them for missions where they will also be pushed to physical and mental limits.
the ability to withstand temporary discomfort for a higher end is trainable. most people do not know any better, and telling them to not even try is rather not charitable.
It's common in the military to train for extreme scenarios, because sooner or later you might encounter them in reality (i.e. war) where you are forced to do it whether you have trained for it or not.
It's good to hear perspectives like these, thanks for sharing. I hear a lot of damning things about this kind of training from a lot of different directions, but what you're talking about sounds sensible and healthy.
You can definitely push military personnel harder--NFL players are unionized, service members aren't, and law and society wouldn't look very kindly on any private enterprise doing some of the harsher things seen in military training.
For an extreme example, consider SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training. This is an extensive course intended to prepare personnel for everything that can go wrong behind enemy lines--how to survive off the land when separated from friendly forces (downed aircrews, for instance), how to evade capture, and what to do when one is actually captured (the "resistance" and "escape" portions). While the early portions of the course cover comparatively "fun" subjects, the later portions involve being subjected to captivity and abuse. The intent is to train people to resist torture and escape from enemy POW camps.
I wonder if it's really 10%. The instructor most likely doesn't actually know the person's limits. They're setting a baseline and hoping everyone has good enough genetics to meet that baseline. The rest are injured/kicked out/may have actually been filtered out earlier. Remember that the military turns down many people, and that often includes a lot of people who have hidden medical issues or just bad genetics.
Fair points, but on the other hand, part of the purpose of training can be to weed out people who are unsuitable for doing whatever you're training for. Maybe there are better ways to do it, but even if rigorous training just weeds out the reckless people and doesn't help the others, I'd still call that an advantage of rigorous training. Of course, it's reasonable to wonder if it helps the others too.
I think a charitable read of remarkEon's comment assumes he meant in the context of combat training, and not necessarily in preparation for life in general.
Yes and there's the difference between training someone to kill quickly and efficiently for a military objective and training someone to slowly inflict cruel forms of extreme suffering on another human over and extended period of time.
The former you may be able to rehabilitate afterwards. The latter is Hannibal material.
When I look at various techniques used in special forces training in the United States -- waterboarding, hypothermia, near-drowning, psychological torutre, etc -- I'm left with the counter-intuitive observation that taking stuff away from people and making life really tough on them has a tendency to make them much more able to handle all the "normal" stuff that many times tangles up the rest of us.
There might be something there which these schools could harvest.
There are more humane ways to train an army than to make them think of situations where someone is trying to kill them, but... if that comes at the expense of worse training (and therefore actual higher likelihood of death) then it doesn't do anyone favors.
The fact that so many people fell for this test means there's something (obviously!) around this scenario that makes it particularly sensitive and mistake-prone for people. Your IT department may chose to avoid it, but people trying to phish you, won't.
As your sibling comments mentioned, there's a difference between giving a chance for someone to learn from a single mistake without punishment, and allowing them to make the same mistake twice without taking matters out of their hands after.
If it's a really critical role, the training will have realistic enough simulation for them to make countless mistakes before they leave the training environment. Then you can assess their level of risk safely.
I wonder how much of that could be due to being less sensitive to danger than they should be. If most of the conditioning was in a context where there were never any severe consequences for failure, you'd expect trainees that were considerably more aggressive than those conditioned in contexts where consequences could include death.
On the deck, the unconscious sailors are rolled on their sides, and as soon as they revive, an instructor shouts again and again: "Are you gonna quit? Are you gonna quit?" Sailors are given 30 seconds to answer or they're kicked out of the program.
A lot their "training" seem designed to weed out those who lack specific innate traits. From what I understand the goal is to cull most people as soon as possible and then train those who remain which suggests they focus on innate talents rather than testing people after they have been trained. Which IMO is a good idea, because you don't know what you are going to face in the real world.
PS: You see the same idea with a large high school's football camp. The first few days is all about weeding people out based on physical fitness.
If an organisation is serious about building mental fortitude, one of the worst (and ineffective to the point of being counter-productive) ways to do that is to let bullies and weak-willed followers freestyle brutalise people.
It doesn't make people stronger. It doesn't create mental fortitude. It just selects for people who will enjoy or put up with that kind of bullshit.
Nobody teaches marksmanship by giving untrained recruits a big box of ammo and seeing who hits the target. Nobody teaches fieldcraft by just releasing untrained people without equipment into the woods and seeing which of them don't starve or die of exposure. Why the hell would anyone try to instill mental fortitude (which is so vitally important in times of stress) through such an incompetent, cack-handed and damaging way? They wouldn't. They're just looking for an excuse to look the other way.
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