[ninetyninenine]

Alphas are just leaders. Whether they have vulnerabilities is orthogonal to the fact that they control and lead the pack. Whether it’s through force or pay.

Do you have a good boss that you like who’s a good person? He’s an alpha. You’re a beta if you’re under him. Do you have a boss who’s an ass hole who got pegged and raped by his uncle when he was a kid and now he’s taking all that pent up humiliation on you? Yeah he has a big vulnerability. But. He. Is. Still. An. Alpha.

It’s not a game. Games are for friend groups and kids. I’m talking about the economic engine that builds civilization itself. That engine is made up of a hierarchy of alphas and betas.

[bbwbsb]

(Dominance-related) insecurity is being pathologically averse to being seen as weak, which leads to preferring dominance as form over dominance as function. If the meek hippie gets everything he wants from his wife, his neighbors, his peers, etc., and the physically impressive traditional man is ignored and rejected, then the hippie is more dominant (i.e., leading and getting what he wants) than the traditional man (even if he is abusing his wife the whole time she laughs at him).

The actually effective strategies are available to the insecure but shunned and rejected because they cannot be tolerated, creating a self-imposed impotence.

The word alpha, in almost every context I've observed, is used exclusively to refer to such dominance as form, especially in substitution for dominance as function. i.e., it is applied almost exclusively to people who are definitionally not dominant.

The only exception I have encountered is women-focused kink literature which, being fantasy, maintains that dominance as form is dominance as function so as to make sexual fantasies seem more real.

In short: you are describing a kink, not real life. Though I consider that you might be joking too; I really can't tell.

[ninetyninenine]

>In short: you are describing a kink, not real life. Though I consider that you might be joking too; I really can't tell.

The fact that you said this means you're out of touch with reality. Let me provide evidence about how wrong you are: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42848939

Literally you can go to the dictionary yourself and look up the definition to see how baseless your argument is.

I don't know why you people are just pulling this bs out of thin air. It can't be just BS is several people are coming from your angle despite extraordinary evidence to the contrary. Maybe it's just shared victimhood. Were you bullied by these types of people before?

[bbwbsb]

I call it a kink because I attract women with the kink.

I'm referring to pragmatics not semantics; the use of dictionary definitions is a category error.

No, I was not bullied. People like I describe would posture, I would raise my eyebrow and wait, and then they would treat me nice and pretend it didn't happen. Dominance as form outside the bedroom is remarkably ineffective. That's why I call it dominance as form.

"When a diplomat says yes, he means ‘perhaps’; When he says perhaps, he means ‘no’; When he says no, he is not a diplomat. —Voltaire (Quoted, in Spanish, in Escandell 1993.)

These lines — also attributed to H. L. Mencken and Carl Jung — may or may not be fair to diplomats, but are surely correct in reminding us that more is involved in what one communicates than what one literally says; more is involved in what one means than the standard, conventional meaning of the words one uses. The words ‘yes,’ ‘perhaps,’ and ‘no’ each has a perfectly identifiable meaning, known by every speaker of English (including not very competent ones). However, as those lines illustrate, it is possible for different speakers in different circumstances to mean different things using those words. How is this possible? What’s the relationship among the meaning of words, what speakers mean when uttering those words, the particular circumstances of their utterance, their intentions, their actions, and what they manage to communicate? These are some of the questions that pragmatics tries to answer; the sort of questions that, roughly speaking, serve to characterize the field of pragmatics."[1]

--

1: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pragmatics/

[hackable_sand]

They are right though. You are describing a kink.

[gilleain]

> I don't know why you people are just pulling this bs out of thin air.

"Am I so out of touch? No. It's the children who are wrong." - Principal Skinner

[fenomas]

> Alphas are just leaders

If you redefine alpha to just mean "leader", then the claim that CEOs are alphas is obviously true, but also meaningless.

But the theory TFA is about was not just that wolf packs had a leader. It made a bunch of other claims, as TFA describes, and those other parts (that you're excluding) are what's considered debunked.

[ninetyninenine]

There's no redefinition here. When we refer to animals in every context, alphas are leaders. There's no "redefinition" going on here at all. What's going on is you're not able to see how alphas apply to human society. You're not able to jump the intellectual gap to identify, "hey if packs of animals have alphas, what's the human equivalent?"

I attempted to jump that gap for you, but you're not able to see it.

>But the theory TFA is about was not just that wolf packs had a leader. It made a bunch of other claims, as TFA describes, and those other parts (that you're excluding) are what's considered debunked.

And he applies that to humans without considering alphas in other animal hierarchies. He implies that the entire theoretical concept of alphas comes ONLY from wolves and once he debunks wolves (with no citations) he debunks the entire concept of what an alpha is. Riiggght.

[cbsmith]

> There's no redefinition here. When we refer to animals in every context, alphas are leaders.

Yes, there is a redefinition. The context of Alpha Wolf was based on the notion of a dominance hierarchy, which does occur when unrelated wolves are put together in a confined space. In the wild though, they function more like a family, with no acts of dominance. The breeding pair still lead the pack, but not through dominance.

https://web.archive.org/web/20051214072331/http://www.npwrc....

[ninetyninenine]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42848939

[cbsmith]

That'd be relevant if it pointed to a problem with the etymology of the term Alpha Wolf.

[earnestinger]

Dominance != aggression

(South park had interesting episode on that)

[HWR_14]

Which episode are you thinking of?

[earnestinger]

I think it was this one https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0705911/

[fenomas]

> What's going on is you're not able to see how alphas apply to human society. You're not able to jump the intellectual gap to identify, "hey if packs of animals have alphas, what's the human equivalent?"

I literally just pointed out that if you are defining alpha to mean "leader" then it's meaningless to then claim that leaders are alphas. That was the comment.

[earnestinger]

> if you are defining alpha to mean "leader"

Could you elaborate what is the meaning of “alpha”? (I sense there is definition, that is being kept secret from me)

[JumpCrisscross]

> Could you elaborate what is the meaning of “alpha”?

There isn't a fixed definition [1]. Most definitions reference dominance, e.g. Merriam-Webster [2]. (Annoyingly, dominance also has different meanings in anthropology, animal ethology, sociology and common use.)

But due to the term being relatively new, adopted from animal ethology, co-tiopted by the memeverse and now being politically charged, you're basically walking into semantic ground zero by using the term.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_and_beta_male

[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alpha#word-histor...

[cycomanic]

Have you actually read the article? He does give a citation to the same author who initially coined the term alpha wolf.

And redefining alpha to just mean leader is a redefinition, as written in the article the term originates from the alpha wolf who achieved dominance through overtly aggressive behaviour (which does not match with how wolves behave in the wild).

It's ironic that you bring up CEOs etc as proof that there's alphas, when the whole premise of the article is that recent structuring of human society is based on an this wrong view that the aggressive dominance is "natural" and what is required for leaders

[ninetyninenine]

>Have you actually read the article? He does give a citation to the same author who initially coined the term alpha wolf.

I meant link to source. Like point me to the place where he defined it that way. Instead he just made a claim without a citation.

For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42848939

These are citations proving my point.

[watwut]

> Alphas are just leaders.

No they are not. There are plenty of leaders who are not alphas and they lead organizations that achieve good things.

Alphas are generally just assholes who want to be leaders. They usually lead self selected friends who crave their validation and people with healthy boundaries just nope out of those systems.

[jonnybgood]

That's not how the word alpha is used colloquially. I believe error_logic is referring to its colloquial usage.

[ninetyninenine]

The colloquial usage is leaders. Not people with insecurities.

[jcranmer]

The only colloquial usage I've seen is that it is someone who has the ability to demand that others perform a public display of obedience to them. Like every time I've seen somebody unironically refer to themself as an "alpha," it's always had that underlying connotation of "Respect Me!" And every time I've seen someone mocking somebody else for being an "alpha," it's because, well, that respect was clearly undeserved.

[earnestinger]

> Like every time I've seen somebody unironically refer to themself as an "your leader," it's always had that underlying connotation of "Respect Me!" And every time I've seen someone mocking somebody else for being an "my leader," it's because, well, that respect was clearly undeserved.

I think same sentiment persists when alpha->”your leader” replacement is made.

[ninetyninenine]

Right but the term here is used to categorize human/animal hierarchies/behavior in an objective context. No one is here projecting their alphaness onto others. Clearly.

[defrost]

A colloquial usage is leaders.

Another common colloquial usage is total self obsessed wanker.