Wrt strength and endurance, what do you think about fitocracy?

I only know about from xkcd, but this seems already set up to have physical goals for leveling up explicit in the design.

I'm an economist. I've taught at a university, worked for a think tank, and worked for government agencies. I've never particularly liked any of them and am now searching for a new career (I'm still plenty young, i.e. < 30).

Teaching at a University is probably the best, but I'm only an average instructor. I get frustrated teaching students that don't get ideas as quickly as I would like them to and it's exhausting.

I don't care much for research. This can either be cause of ego (I want to make big discoveries, not small incremental ones), because I'm inherently skeptical of my results (I have some qualms with statistical hubris), or because I don't have that je ne sais quoi that true researchers have.

Think tanks and government agencies were too political for me, although in surprising ways which I won't go into.

I suggest self-limiting participation according to these criteria:

Advice seekers: "I want to move from present equilibrium A to desired equilibrium B. Here is my specific problem. What should I do?"

Advice givers: "I have field-tested solution X. YMMV."

Advice takers: "My results, in detail."

"Winning" looks like fewer preventable problems in friendships, dating, sex, and romance.

There seems to be a strong sense that a thread like this won't work. My question is: What would it look like if it did work? We seem to know where we don't want to go, but I don't have a clear idea of where we do want to go? What does winning look like?

Even if you sport a rather lengthy mane (which I'm assuming you do) once every six months seems way too infrequent.

Six months isn't enough time to grow a lengthy mane! As I recall, it took much longer than that for me to grow my ponytail, and various internet sources confirm that hair grows at about six inches per year. (I haven't had a haircut since late 2006, but my hair seems to have maxed out in length some time ago.)

Sorry, I was being jokingly rhetorical but I guess it didn't come through. It's moot anyway. I don't think I'd put effort into my hair beyond the occasional shampoo and once-every-six-months haircut if "boyishly mussed" weren't a common preference.

I found this to be illuminating, although it has all the flaws you would expect from a magazine article (sub-par documentation, crummy story:information ratio).

The 4th page has a really interesting chart with different workout structures for different goals.

but resents that poets and artists are specifically called on to do so, apparently because he sees that as reducing their humanity to mere titles.

I understood the rest of your comment, but I don't understand this part. I, for example, am a software engineer. If SIAI wanted me to write some sort of an AI-management console for them, I would gladly do it. I don't think this would "reduce my humanity to a mere title". Acknowledging that my particular skills are well-suited to writing AI consoles, and poorly suited to, say, writing poems, does not somehow objectify me. No one can be good at everything, after all (at least, not in our pre-Singularity world).

So... are artists somehow fundamentally different from software engineers in this respect ?

Well, I don't know what the SIAI people were thinking. It's possible, for example, that they were thinking "let's just get everyone we can, the more the merrier, filtering out specific professions is not worth the effort". But the original article implies that the Singularity movement does not need liberal arts participants at all; at least, not in their professional capacity:

I would call on you to participate as a human being, not an artist. If your artistry has something to say, it will express itself naturally in your responses, without you needing to make a conscious effort to say something artist-like.

I, on the other hand, believe that artists can contribute professionally, as per my post above. You seem to be more concerned with the question, "even if artists can contribute, should SIAI seek them out deliberately ?", but I don't have an opinion on that.

I'm definitely in the cluster of people you're describing (though my sci-fi background is pretty lacking), but I haven't noticed any particular references to them in most posts. I hope I'm not just totally blind...

Where are you seeing the cultural references? Comments? Do you mean the transhumanisty stuff?