> I get that involving a human body complicates the analysis. That was the point: that you can’t appeal to it as a simple example to ground the intuition in other case.

Yeah, fair enough. It's unfortunate that the comment you were responding to involved "caloric intake" suggestive of a biological system when it could just as easily have involved a mechanical pulley. Their intuition would have been stronger phrased as: Within a gravitational field that is approximated as a uniform force field, the amount of energy/work to raise a weight by a fixed distance is independent of the initial position of that weight on a (massless) rope attached to a (frictionless) pulley.

> I was referring to a human holding it. What would have been a better way to keep you from missing that?

Since you are asking, for me, it would helped to have the following inserted text: "In fact it takes positive energy [for biological muscle] just told a weight at a fixed height, doing zero mechanical work!" so that the statement stood on it's own, or else including within your post a more definitive statement to the effect of "intuitions involving the human body complicates the analysis", as you did in this reply. If "that was the point", go ahead and state it.

To be fair, I often have the same problem. It's easy for me to write a lot of text that goes around a statement without actually getting to it.