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by munificent 1107 days ago
Or, in software engineering terms, it's impossible to optimize code that you can't profile.
1 comments

I think "can't profile" is probably the most accurate in summary.

Although you can kinda benchmark, i.e training exercises, that allow you to test people physically and technically, but it's a really poor analogy, because it's not feasible to test people emotionally and mentally to the stresses of a real life scenario without having a real life scenario - its possible to simulate, but not ethical, it would be far too dangerous to the individual and the people running the scenario.

The thing about benchmarking and profiling is that you need a target scenario. Even if you can simulate a generic representation of a given workload, you might have different workload, or your specific environment might differ from the norm. One could imagine an armed force that actually was well attuned to fight a near-peer power in a border conflict, but wasn't well setup to fight battle a continent away against guerrilla forces. This is a peril all benchmarking has, even when correct, it is still limited to its own assumptions and context.