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Comment by mattgreenrocks | Hacker News Reader

I can relate to this.

I have high aspirations and expectations for myself. These often create very good opportunities and reinforce my work ethic. But they also have consequences outside of work that I have to pay for. I'm not good at relaxing and I believe I always need to be working on something. Quite frankly, it is a neurosis. Hand-waving comments about "reaching one's potential" as it relates to evolution don't address the topic fully. There needs to be a balance, a time to relax and say, "this is sufficient." The emotional side of your being needs to be allowed the space to breathe.

Perhaps more nuanced thinking on this topic can bring down the level of alpha worship we have in our culture.

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You are not a baboon. Social structures are unique to each species. You are rationalizing and justifying your decisions. You don't have to. If it works for you, that's reason enough.

> Perhaps more nuanced thinking on this topic can bring down the level of alpha worship we have in our culture.

There are no alpha/beta males in human society. An overwhelming majority of males get access to females.

Do you mean admiration of more aggressive males?

I'd say that's flat out wrong. We send those to jail and execute them.

If anything, we admire people who get things done. Nobody cares how you do it. If you don't admire people for what they accomplish, then what do you admire them for?

> There are no alpha/beta males in human society. An overwhelming majority of males get access to females.

This is absolutely false. What percentage of our ancestors were women? It isn't 50%. Half of the people who ever lived were women, but thats certainly not the case for all the people who ever lived and have a descendant living today.

Thanks to DNA analysis we know that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men.

To get that kind of difference, the figures have to be something like: Throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.

In other words, most human males who ever lived do not have descendants who are alive today.

maratd is talking about present day human society not the evolutionary past.

According to a survey carried out in 2000, 84% of males and 86% of females reproduce:

http://fatherhood.hhs.gov/charting02/introduction.htm#Who

>Thanks to DNA analysis we know that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men.

Link?

The line is actually from a psychology address that I've had bookmarked for a few years. It's pretty interesting, so I decided to submit it as its own topic:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2767867

Or the address here:

http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm?

The line itself is unsourced, or at least taken for granted, in the address.

So that means every other man, or one in three, is an alpha male? I have my doubts. According to the sophisticated baboon theory from the article, it seems that there are way fewer alpha males than a 1 in 3 number.

The alpha male concept is extremely flawed when it comes to human beings. Quick question: What happens, if you put 100 acknowledged alpha males from all over the country (you know, the ones who screw all the women out there) in one room? According to alpha male theory, there must be one out of them who still is THE super alpha male.

I agree with the general premise that the social situations are only very loosely analogous, but your argument against it is quite poor.

>So that means every other man, or one in three, is an alpha male? I have my doubts.

No, that is not a conclusion you can draw at all. Not every animal that reproduces is alpha, as you would have realized if you read the article.

So say the baboon group has 10 males and 10 females. 8 females reproduce. 2 males each have one offspring each, the beta has 4, the alpha gets 8. That's 40% of the males reproducing, half the number of females that reproduce.

Obviously humans are different, because we don't have a harem social structure; we're a lot more monogamous. But we do see high status males getting a disproportionate number of women.

>What happens, if you put 100 acknowledged alpha males from all over the country

If you take 100 alpha males and artificially create a new social group with all of them, what would happen is they would fight with each other and establish a new social hierarchy. You're acting as if there's some platonic version of the alpha male. The alpha male is just the dude that can kick the other dudes' butts in their current situation. Social hierarchies shift constantly.

Is the "alpha" about the number of offspring, or the number of females "available"? You seem to be confusing the two in your example.

Alpha is... about carefully defining your terms in advance, then using them. There are a number of relevant senses. Both of the examples you gave are relevant, as are discussions about how alphas behave and psychologically dominate others, and humans have interesting quirks not found in the animal world since we have such rich social lives, like being behaviorally "alpha" with one group of people, but not other groups.

I'm not sure what's confusing you.

In my example I was using an example given above (80% of females reproducing, 40% of males reproducing, thus, twice as many females reproducing as males.)

I only talked about the division of offspring among the males because that's what's relevant in this case; they denote the relative hierarchy. The division of offspring among females is not relevant since we are talking about males. It was just a toy example anyway to show how the math works out.

This makes sense. If you work yourself to the bone just to be successful and putting yourself in the position to compete with other "alphas," you're going to be stressed. And you're not going to fight your competitors to the death over a job or female baboon — you have to play by society's rules, which attempts to equalize us to some degree.

Human civilization, of course, is far too complex to reduce people to just alpha or beta. But some people still like to think of it that way. Which is why I'm thinking of starting a "beta pride" movement: We're less stressed, we rarely end up in prison and we still manage to find mates once in a while.

Who's with me?

I doubt you can (even remotely) compare the stress levels and omnipresent threat of losing rank and life an "alpha" baboon has to face with a heightened thrive for perfection and possible ADHD.

> While the new study does not have a direct application to human health or social structure[...]

I think ultimately the "alpha worship" we see today is nothing but a new marketing term for the old and very human desire that has always been there: to FINALLY get what one has always desired and self-help on how to be "alpha" is nothing but the snake-oil of the hour.

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