The Alpha Myth: How captive wolves led us astray
anthonydavidadams.substack.com
anthonydavidadams.substack.com
This goes along with an imagined mockumentary, narrated by a David Attenborough figure, ex: "In the living room, a confrontation is brewing. The Big Boss has informed the bottom-tier Henchmen Homies that it is time for lights-out, but they are not ready to leave the television and they resent the privileges of the older Made Man, who is permitted to remain. This is a problem for the Big Boss, since directly punishing them might undermine his claim to control the group as a whole. Fortunately for him, his Enforcer is arriving from the kitchen, attracted by the noise..."
Most countries manage to keep automatic weapons out of prisons.
Or that we aren't dogs. Chimpanzees do have an alpha male who commonly achieves his role through violence.
Correct. A book on Chimpanzees was connected to human nature by a reviewer in the Chicago Tribune, a 1999 Time article and the obviously totally-scientific pick-up book The Game [1].
best way I've heard it explained: the alpha chimp usually does the most grooming of other chimps of any of the males in the troop.
they're out there making deals and building relationships. tough guys can try to overpower those so the top chimp also gotta be tough enough to stand up, but it's as much about relationships as it is about muscles
The qualifier some needs to be applied to that too. None of the schools I have any personal knowledge of in the UK or Norway bear (or bore in the case of my own childhood) the slightest resemblance to a prison. Well, there was one. I accompanied a colleague in the US when he picked up his daughter at the end of the school day, I was astonished to find that he had to present himself at a reception desk that was guarding locked doors that were the only way in and out.
It is not about having bars and armed guards, it is about having a strong fixed hierarchy, fixed routines, rules far stricter than society outside, punishments such as being put in isolation etc.
A lot of this applies to some other highly disciplined environments such as the military too, but it is not the norm for most of us (and the military volunteer to be there).
The physical and security aspects of a school in the UK are not like a prison, but the social and discipline aspects are. More so at some schools than others and I think people who have only had contact with better schools do not realise how bad the bad ones can be.
I grew up in a poor rural area and my wife an upper class coastal community, both in the USA. It’s amazing to compare and contrast our public school experiences. I was just trying to survive a situation that was both psychologically and physically abusive, with public humiliation rituals, solitary confinement, and gangs of bullies that cornered and robbed people and violently punished social non conformity- I still feel terror remembering it decades later. Even the lessons were nonsense propaganda- science classes literally focused on creationism, history class on “states rights,” etc. She was in a playful relaxing environment that included regular upper class leisure activities like sailing, skiing, and horseback riding, and had well equipped science labs with teachers that were passionate about science.
Don't believe for a second that growing up in an upper class environment does not have social dynamics. I grew up in one in Europe. In an upper class school there are bullies as bad as you could find in a lower class one, probably worse, because they have resources and connections to create harm. And sometimes their parents are worse than them.
Do not idealise what you have not live. You could go skiing and they can choke with the ski poles. This happened to one of my friends because he criticised one guy.
Despite going to a poor school, my family was well off, and I had personal experience with other environments including Boy Scouts, summer camps, etc. that still included normal social dynamics between boys with plenty of fighting, etc. but that is absolutely nothing like what I am describing above.
I'll use your own words to describe the change in the experience
>I was just trying to survive a situation that was both psychologically and physically abusive, with public humiliation rituals, solitary confinement, and gangs of bullies that cornered and robbed people and violently punished social non conformity-
I got the full 'the science teacher is the bully coach and believes the world was created 6000 years ago, and if you were one of the kids they liked you could commit crimes, and you were not liked then crimes could be committed against you' experience.
My kids were home educated up to 16 and then went to a sixth form college (school for 16 to 18 year olds) that is pretty good and well funded with some really good teachers (the physics teachers are outstanding - one that taught by older daughter now works for CERN, the head of department has a PhD, and they are all passionate about the subject). its not immune from league table pressure, the curse of education in the UK.
What do you make of the recent claim that something like 20-30% of people are fundamentally authoritarian in nature and want these fixed hierarchies and routines?
and some workplaces.
Arguably many cities more resemble "captivity" than a natural environment.
Do you have any evidence that suggests prison gangs are similar to street gangs?
Maybe, but the question was a different one: are group dynamics in a gang in a prison the same as in a gang outside the prison?
Economically, you have to understand some of the function of a street gang as we currently understand them: it is to be able to provide retail drug sales without either elaborate vetting of clients (which many potential clients will be unable to comply with), and without having the police be able to trivially shut it down.
The thing that makes this work is the use of juveniles to take the money/hand off the drugs. The police can easily find and arrest them, but they don't suffer prison sentences or unsealed criminal records as a result. Adults monitor the process but do not handle the drugs or money out in the open, so it is non-trivial to arrest them.
As a result, gangs have to be attractive to juveniles (almost exclusively boys), and function in a lot of ways as a social group and/or a somewhat violent community sports team (the sport in question being "having fistfights with other gangs"). Adult criminals who lead the gang push towards more serious violence with economic goals (eg: seizing the most valuable territory) and less social activities, the teenagers who are in the gang push towards more recreational violence and more social activities. Depending on what the size of the economic opportunity is in the area, you get more or less professional-seeming gangs.
So for example you see all this kind of D&D-like creation of iconography and myths in street gangs, strange coded symbols that they use in graffiti and superstitious beliefs (Bloods avoiding the use of the letter "c" in their words because it evokes their rivals the Crips), that I, at least, felt an undeniable resonance with in terms of my own adolescence. This doesn't serve an economic rationale and I think that adult gang leaders mostly are annoyed with it as a distraction, but reflects the interests and proclivities of the rank-and-file members.
You also need most of the teenagers to age out of the gang and leave (the gang can't absorb lots of adult members), which means being somewhat relaxed about entry and exit to the gang.
Absent an economic rationale for the gang, like prior to the rise of organized drug sales, my understanding is that teenage-dominated gangs were in general just social circles for malcontent teenage males, who largely did, like, vandalism and antisocial pranks, not Real Big Serious Crime.
Prison gangs, lacking the juvenile component, seem to me to be seriously different, though I've never read much about them.
You go to prison and have your rights stripped away and you pretty much have nothing. As much as gangs use violence they also provide protection and friendship.
Now you get out of prison and you have that big old criminal stain on your record. You're having trouble surviving and making enough, but you remember your new gang friends tell you to find a guy when you're out and he can help you. Congratulations, the circle is complete.
This article explains a lot better how I feel about this than I was able to 15 years ago.
When I instead started to treat them as glorified chimps, everything went better for them and for me.
In the meantime I'm still somehow expecting that my children will behave like little people... Haha, humans really suck at learning, even from our own experiences.
It's a really hard balancing act but with the chimp framework in place, the human development can flourish.
After that she could be reasoned with, but had reduced ability to keep to her intention long term due to lack of experience and inability to imagine outcomes, so a lot of teaching an early elementary schooler involves setting up experiments to demonstrate the wisdom or lack of wisdom in particular actions. At least in my parenting. I imagine this is what is meant.
For a silly example in teaching chess - a typical issue is kids moving way too fast. You can explain to them why it's bad, and they understand. They can then even show you exact moments where they really hurt themselves from moving too quickly, and so on.
So after this you think to yourself - 'I did a great job. He not only knows not to do this, but more importantly - why.' Then next game he's right back to playing like he starts with 10 seconds on his clock.
So then - ok forget all the logic stuff. Each move I want you to literally sit on your hands for at least 10 seconds before moving. And suddenly - the problem is resolved.
But then, I also think of adults as glorified chimps. Many parts are somewhat more complex -- though if you look closely enough, you'll see that much of the complexity is more of a veneer than anything deep.
Basic human nature shows through more with kids. Much of human nature is animal nature. Growing up seems to be mostly about setting those impulses against each other and delaying, suppressing, and avoiding the manifestations. In the process, we convince ourselves that we've had earth-shaking fundamental realizations about Truth and Beauty and Morality that lesser beings like children could never comprehend, as we go about our day with a sippy cup of caffeine in one hand, capturing the value that others have created as we lie and deceive to advance our supposedly noble goals, shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the herd.
I regard it as a dangerous mind virus. It is hard to rid yourself of it even if you see it is bullshit and harming you because it requires a substantial change in how you see your life. I think that’s because it is some hard truths (“people like powerful people”) mixed in with some cognitive distortions (“dominance is the primary mediator of all interactions”). The lack of a true definition means there is no objective measure of what it is, which makes it impossible to feel secure in. Thus, the endless arguing about whether behavior is really “alpha” or “beta.”
There are good bits there, such as not letting yourself be pushed around. But that doesn’t make it all good or true. I really think the whole artifice is a cop-out for actually doing the work of individuation and self-development because you outsource all the hard work of deciding what you want to be and the temporary, self-imposed emotional exile it takes to actually discern that to following guidelines ultimately given to you by other people.
You’re still not crafting your own life, you’re just changing who you get your life script from.
It exploits psychological vulnerabilities in people and traps them: if you worry about your alpha/beta status, then you’ll be the type of person who wants to fix it, but there isn’t a fix because your perspective is the issue.
Hope that was helpful for someone.
Trying to be the alpha in such a situation, so they can look down at the others and feel better, instead of doing anything to try actually improve the world, is an unhealthy reaction, but one I can at least understand.
Trying to be an “alpha” irrespective and create that sort of situation for others, on the other hand, is rather despicable.
Another factor in the longevity of alpha/beta/other designations is that they don't only come from that study (and those that followed it, or it referenced). The terms were used elsewhere both in science and fiction (and, specifically, in well known science fiction such as Huxley's “Brave New World” which pre-dates the publication of Schenkel's infamous wolf study by a decade and a half).
Too much emphasis is placed on government regulation and corporate environments to "make things right" when, in the end, they are all just rigid bureaucratic structures that trap people and force them into heirarchies.
For my entire life, I have mostly tried to conform to this -- albeit mostly focusing on startups because they are more likely to value individuals, and less likely to have rigid structure and tradition -- but I'm only just now realizing that my autistic and ADHD tendencies being pigeon-holed even this much is a recipe for the burnout I've experienced for most of my adult life. I need to try something different!
And if I lived in a more rigid society (all non-capitalist countries are far more rigid than capitalist ones -- pretty much by definition) my options for fleeing rigidity would be vanishingly small.
Supposed “alpha behaviors” are seemingly identical to toddler behaviors to me. I think it’s ironically non-masculine to be so terrified of how you appear that you play act as basically a belligerent child incapable of compromise, teamwork, or navigating disagreements with dignity instead of being yourself.
The ancient stoics had a much healthier, and more useful idea of masculinity IMO- that still lets you be strong and not pushed around by others inappropriately.
This is why I suggested stoicism (and modern therapy methods based on it like ACT and CBT) as a practical alternative that fulfills the same emotional need in a mentally healthier, and more responsible way.
It essentially flips this around entirely, and says the only thing that really matters is how you perceive yourself, e.g. knowing you are acting according to your own goals and values. You can only control how you act and perceive things, not what others think about you, and there is no value or point in worrying about things outside your control.
Instead of trying to "look strong" you can actually just be strong- and stand by your convictions and values.
Agree on the stoicism point. Inner strength is just as important as external strength.
Grifters and people selling right-wing politics have figured out how to market to male insecurity. They're selling politicians of course but also quack supplements, self-help nonsense, masculinity gurus, hilarious "boot camps" where you spend tens of thousands to have some dumbass yell at you, etc. All that stuff will leave you still insecure, and with less money.
Andrew Tate is probably the undisputed master of the alpha male grift. He's known as an abuser of women, and he is, but really men are his main marks. In a way part of his grift is to make his marks utterly repulsive to most women, keeping them alone and insecure and customers.
(And male insecurity has always been a target. Don't let that bully kick sand at you at the beach! But I agree that the targeting has recently been vastly more tuned and optimized and the most egregious forms have become socially acceptable.)
I think the same reasoning applies - it is vague and easy to apply and people want it to be true - just for different people.
I guess it has a life of its own now. Seems like a good example of the semiotics concept of the signifier becoming disconnected from the signified: a heated debate over the finer points of wolf pack social dynamics being carried out by people with no particular knowledge of or interest in wolves.
It's hilarious that something so obvious is considered worth denying, but I guess it's an example of how intellectualization can be used to exploit psychological weakness.
Dude, you are literally responding to someone arguing that alphas are real with an article that completely disproves your thesis.
This isn't even a new revelation. Biologists have long known that the whole "wolf alpha" thing was BS.
But further, we aren't wolves, we aren't lions. Male lions taking over a pride will murder all the cubs, should we? Female Cynomolgus monkeys will have sex with every male in the troupe so as to confuse who that father is of the offspring, should we?
No species of animal is the same and there are no "norms" in the animal kingdom.
Nothing more beta than confidently spouting BS without taking the time to research your own positions.
What sometimes happens is that people use flawed reasoning to arrive to correct conclusions. Has it ever happened to you that you made a mistake but then you made another mistake and these two cancelled each other out? My take is, wolves might or might not have an alpha male, that is completely irrelevant, but if so many people subscribe to the idea, then there must be something true about it. In particular, most human societies are highly hierarchical. Heck, "the land of free" elects a new alpha male every four years, many other countries don't even bother holding elections.
> The lack of a true definition means there is no objective measure of what it is, which makes it impossible to feel secure in.
Just because a concept cannot be easily defined it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Example: tell me what is consciousnesses.
> It exploits psychological vulnerabilities in people and traps them: if you worry about your alpha/beta status, then you’ll be the type of person who wants to fix it, but there isn’t a fix because your perspective is the issue.
This way of thinking is extremely common. When people face a concept they don't like, they just deny it. Otherwise their belief system would turn out to be incomplete.
1) it fits into existing worldviews - the myth of the alpha validates people continuing to do what they want to do and what they've always done. it's a lot easier to accept information that tells you that you and the systems with which you're already familiar and comfortable are correct
2) it's intuitive to understand - "the big guy kicks the crap out of the little guys and takes all their stuff" is not something that has any sharp edges to snag unwary intellects. We've all seen this system at work. Also the popular understanding of evolution at the time was that competition happened at the level of the organism, which dovetails nicely with this theory of competition and dominance where our more current understanding of competition at the level of the gene complex introduces the possibility of cooperation and even self-sacrifice as valid survival strategies.
3) it trended in the same direction as society at the time - the book came out in 1970, about the same time that we started trending toward neoliberalism which is a hyperindividualistic, hypercompetitive worldview. If you like neoliberalism then this is why you like it, and if you don't this is why you don't. This means that as this idea was becoming more and more well-known there was a lot of room for it in the emerging zeitgeist. It's the political and sociological equivalent to 1, but with significance added by people who were already dedicated to engineering our culture in that direction in the first place latching onto this idea because it indicates that they're so correct that the whole world is already designed around principles of individualism and competition.
What were we doing before 1970? Not being adversarial here, asking from curiosity.
It details how "pre-modern" societies functioned based on the available archaeological and anthropological evidence we have, and one of its key findings is just how much human history conflicts with narratives like "the alpha myth". It also goes into detail about how we ended up with so many social narratives like it that just don't have any justifiable precedent.
but in the rare case a social scientist want to lear about memory borrowing, i would also suggest somethig more recent (and less anachist to this crowd) https://ia804705.us.archive.org/13/items/byung-chul-han-the-...
I think the core thesis is spot on from what I've seen of discussions, and am looking to decide which aspects of ambition are my own, and which have I have accepted unconsciously.
I strongly recommend The Burnout Society, though I think it tackles these issues from a different perspective: "how we compromise ourselves in service of the (false) personal and societal narratives we've constructed".
A more direct line to The Dawn of Everything in the sense of "how did we construct these narratives in the first place?" would probably be Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. Coincidentally for this thread, it also includes a chapter on the results of real wolf domestication studies (and how it affects animal behaviour) in past decades.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's great to post relevant and informative links, but please do it without putting down others. If you're participating here, you're as much the community as anyone else is.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Also Auther: Applies behavior of wolves in free environment to a very specific and complex part of human society.
And of course, zero link or citations on anything.
I think the full picture isn't some liberal idea where everyone lives in harmony and can work together for the common good without the weakest link ever getting left behind.
The truth is it's a bit of both. We live in a world where it's dog eat dog but also companionship and working together are BOTH effective strategies for survival. Most humans are programmed to be able to handle both modes of survival . Depending on circumstance one strategy often becomes critical for survival. For example: if you're in captivity or aka a setting with very very limited resources the alpha strategy works best.
Of course no citations for me either. But I think it's quite clear the author is biased.
But who cares? Humans are more closely related to primates than other animals, who exhibit all kinds of different behaviors across species. I am not sure why we’re trying to model human behaviors from wolves at all.
In fact, human advanced cognitive development is unique amongst the entirety of the animal kingdom, so it’s okay if humans have behaviors which are unique just to us, and are unobserved in other animals.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/bitch-on-the-female-of-the-spec...
But the article is bad. Just about every piece of evidence has some sort of issue. Correlation-causation, or not enough data, or just assumptions. The wolf stuff (seems to be) based on only 2 observations. The author cites big tech in CA, but then describes a single clothing company that has a high random metric that is supposedly an accurate indicator of all of the above.
And the connections between arguments are not even that good. Skimming over it, I wasn't sure what the article's point was.
As for the conclusion, the vague words on what could be done are the kind of stuff everyone is trying anyway for other reasons, and it isn't (?) working.
Author: silicon valley is somewhat of a captive environment so lessons from captivity are not entirely wrong.
But...there is. He never claimed there wasn't an alpha. Just that the selection among a group of wolves forced together differs from a group of wolves in a natural setting.
So Tony Soprano was the alpha of the crime family even though many other characters were likely stronger, crazier, etc. He had the backing of so many people that they knew that his bark had bite, even if it wasn't from him directly.
So, sounds like if the author read the study more closely and continued with his idea of basing human society around dog society we should structure society as a hereditary monarchy rather than rule by warrior kings.
That you can certainly opt in to artificial nonsense, as wholeheartedly and completely as you want, doesn’t mean society is artificial. It just means that’s the part you’ve decided to live your life in.
People are beginning to consider that the most pervasive aspects of society—parts that you don’t have a choice whether you’re a part of it or confronted by it—are social constructs, and that humans are constrained in what they’re allowed to believe in and how to come to terms with those beliefs amongst one another.
If we've achieved nothing else, at least we've added a layer of political and economic indirection to our cannibalism.
Zero-sum, yes, but why only artificial scarcity? It seems like this would arise in a natural situation as well... Even if you lived on abundantly producing land that is not (yet) heavily populated there is still going to be mate competition.
> Instead of ruling from above, he built a flat structure where decisions emerge from collaboration.
I've also seen the flip-side of this - where due to the fact that there is no established hierarchy, you spend inordinate amounts of time welding entirely disparate architectures together since every team was cowboy coding and doing their own thing.
Also anecdotally, I've never once experienced this Type-A prima donna alpha engineer but I've had absolutely zero interest in working for a FAANG. Every engineer I've ever worked with was pretty easy-going.
Most are bluster.
Talk loud and fast and be rude, arrogant, and lot of people will think you must really know what you are doing.
Every one seems easy going until you disagree with them.
Related, the Norwegian documentary series "Hjernevask" (i.e. Brainwash) is interesting - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hjernevask
Do we use alpha male gorillas to explain the concept?
(Edit) Or Chimpanzees: https://news.janegoodall.org/2018/07/10/top-bottom-chimpanze...
The highest-ranking chimpanzee in a group is the alpha-male. These males climb their way to the top of the chimpanzee hierarchy, and the ways they choose to do so can differ with the personality of the individual leader. Take two of the alpha males observed in Gombe, Frodo and Freud, for instance. Though they were brothers, each chimp had a very different leadership style. While Freud maintained control through fostering strong alliances and grooming those he wanted to keep under his command, Frodo relied heavily on aggression and brute strength.Remind me, why gorillas and not chimps? Why chimps and not bonobos? Why assume that two related species with completely different environmental niches must share a social structure?
https://cosmosmagazine.com/nature/animals/bonobos-arent-as-p...
Wolves were never meant to be evidence. They were a model, a metaphor.
I wonder how many people who complain about "believing the myth of alpha wolves" are the same people who defend astrology as a "useful way of thinking, whether it's true or not".
Some wolf biologists thought that, sure. But that obviously wasn't and isn't any kind of evidence about human sociology (and conversely nor is the fact that it isn't).
I wonder how many people defend mind palaces as a "useful way of thinking, whether it's true or not".
Historically speaking, that's all astrology was. Research has indeed shown that people who practice astrology are better at remembering details about people in their lives. Astrology is just a mind palace that allows them to more easily memorize and organize useful facts about the people in their social networks
It's no wonder that they are our closest cousin.
Gorillas, in comparison, are much more laid-back.
The concept of a dominance hierarchy is widely established:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_hierarchy?wprov=sfti...
And the gorillas and chimpanzees studied are not in captivity.
Obviously not every species exhibits this, and the ones that do don't exhibit it all the time. But the article acts like the concept has been discredited when that is not the case at all.
It isn't wrong. The headline is intentionally misleading and the article is just woke nonsense. Read it for yourself.
What the article is really saying that the alpha in a zoo wolfpack is different than an alpha in a wild wolfpack because a zoo wolfpack is between non-related wolves whilest in the wild, wolfpacks are composed of family members ( alpha father/alpha mother and children ).
There are alpha in wolf packs ( zoos and wild ). Just like in a human family the father/mother are alphas while in a gang, the alpha is usually a non-related individual.
The "myth" isn't that the alpha doesn't exist. The "myth" is about the relation of the alpha to the rest of the pack.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
https://www.science.org/content/article/bonobos-join-chimps-...
We should use chimpanzees. The popular definition evolved pretty much indepdenently of the science, unfortunately [1].
Management texts have tried toning this down, particularly in the gender-equality years. At its nonsensical limit one wound up with alpha = leader, which is tautologically useless as a tool for explaining leadership.
The term probably belongs in a bin. There are deep social lessons we can learn from observing chimpanzees. (Or even wolves.) But they're not going to condense into a single term, certainly not one that's been through the 4chan and partisan ringers. Even among chimpanzees, we see a variety of tactics used to achieve dominance, including groups of chimps banding together to topple a leader.
I love the dialectical equivalency here, Feels exactly accurate. At least 4chan plays you laugh you lose, federal politics seems to omit the first half.
> dominance, including groups of chimps
Indeed one of the most fascinating lessons. "Alpha" by force is almost tautologically impossible; leadership is built on inspiration and willfullness.
Why should we use anything at all? Aren't we people ourselves, who, you know, behave like people, without being taught how?
Ok, what does this mean when pretty much all people are taught to be people by the generations before them?
We throw out a number of feral children and see how they grow up in the wilds? Doesn't sound very ethical.
Same reason we play with models: it’s easier to understand through analogy, with the familiar cast unfamiliarly.
There is such myriad behavior in the animal kingdom that drawing insight into human social structure from it seems like it is more often a Rorschach test than it is a scientific exercise.
Hopelessness keeps you on the drugs as much as biochemistry.
Kicking any bad habit is easier if you have something to replace it with.
To be clear, lots of studies have shown that animals in richer environments do less drugs; though the effect doesn't seem to be as strong as Alexander claimed.
Many people associate it with the toxic traits of dominating others through aggression. While other's use it to reference a healthy, good, strong, well developed and balanced individual who helps others.
I think we need new terms for these things so we can start differentiate them.
If "alpha" means good in some social context, people will load it up with all the contradictory qualities that different people consider good.
"Darwinism can be used to back up two mad moralities, but it cannot be used to back up a single sane one. The kinship and competition of all living creatures can be used as a reason for being insanely cruel or insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy love of animals. On the evolutionary basis you may be inhumane, or you may be absurdly humane; but you cannot be human. That you and a tiger are one may be a reason for being tender to a tiger. Or it may be a reason for being as cruel as the tiger. It is one way to train the tiger to imitate you, it is a shorter way to imitate the tiger. But in neither case does evolution tell you how to treat a tiger reasonably, that is, to admire his stripes while avoiding his claws.
If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to the garden of Eden. For the obstinate reminder continued to recur: only the supernatural has taken a sane view of Nature. The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved." ~ Chesterton
You don't need to argue that "alpha males" don't exist amongst wild animals to make that case that it's bad for human civilization.
Human's aren't in their natural habit most of the time either. "Prison-yard dynamics" is how the public education system functions. This is where our children are socialized.
Observing outside life has led me to conclude that the high school popularity contest, is, in fact, the most authentic, freest form of human social behavior.
My guy, comb your hair, take a shower, put on deodorant and a clean shirt. You’re fine.
Curious prediction.
What makes a cage? I'd say something where sustainability is a factor - there are limited leads, limited work, limited territory. People slow down otherwise they become too productive, deplete the work available, and get laid off. Hierarchies evolve around controlling these limited resources. All the danger is internal. There's constant resources coming in from god knows where, so budgeting takes priority over hunting.
If that were as true as you seem to be suggesting, there would be no difference between dogs and wolves when the latter are kept as pets, which is clearly false.
Jack London's gold rush books explore this concept in detail, the first of which, Call of the Wild, was published in 1903. These were very popular books, then and still today.
The alpha wolf concept was in public psyche at least in the early 1900s, but probably earlier too. I don't think it is likely that London invented this myth himself and it existed earlier.
You need the right conditions to repro the behavior.
E.g. for starters, you cannot study one wolf in isolation from other wolves, right? You need at least two for one to dominate the other, and they can't be miles apart such that they never meet.
2. Even if there's no other species where an "alpha" exists, what forbids us from it being a human thing? No that I want to look up to a mere mortal "alpha" e.g. dictators. Only real alpha is Christ.
3. There's always an alpha in friend groups, I've seen it, should I pluck out my eyes as they're lying to me? Heck no. Doesn't mean the women in the friend group took turns doing you know what to his you know what. An alpha is simple a leader, online manosphere groups took it to the extreme of being "the guy that gets most girls" but in truth being known helps with that whole thing.
4. Even my previous 3 points didn't resonate with you, it's just an allegory, I don't know why this particular alpha thing has hit a nerve with some many people, that even whole ass articles have been written up against it, what is the problem with men aspiring to be better? An alpha shares his spoils anyways, in Lions in Hyenas in Coyotes, etc.
It turned out that rats that live in a nice environment, with plenty of activities and social spaces (not an ugly, mostly empty cage), don’t become addicted
Ref: Rat Park experiment
It's fitting for this thread though, because it survives for the exact reason the alpha wolf stuff survives: people love the story so they hang on to it irrespective of the science.
The first two units on neurology and cognition seem sensible, but I can see how it’ll quickly go off the rails after that.
> never replicated
Wiki says:
Studies that followed up on the contribution of environmental enrichment to addiction produced mixed results.
Did someone try to replicate it? What were the results? What were their conclusions about its credibility?
> all the other stuff in social psych which hasn't survived the replication crisis.
Replication isn't black and white: Most of the experiments - at least in the early widely reported phase - did replicate but with less statistically strong results.
That’s how the article phrased it. I’m not certain if I agree or not, but I’m not ready to either accept or dismiss it.
For instance, take the myth of RICE to treat injuries. The myth lived for over 30 years before being debunked, but even a decade after it was soundly routed, we still find the advice in the wild.
https://thesportjournal.org/article/the-r-i-c-e-protocol-is-...
How is sociology involved in this subthread or the OP? In the OP, the researchers have straightened out the issue and the general public ias confused.
Let's assume for the sake of argument that the "alpha myth" is actually true as it pertains to humans, and the most aggressive and dominating ones rise to the top.
Now look around you. Who are those people at the top of your society who unironically refer to themselves as "alphas" and embrace all the rhetoric around that, and what kind of world do they create around them?
I'd like to learn more about how abundance of food, lack of threats and other comforts of civilization distort the formerly vital instincts into all kind of dysfunctional and harming behavior. And more importantly, how to manage those.
Go over the hills from Silicon Valley to Ano Nuevo Marine Conservation Area and watch the behavior of male elephant seals like Bernie LeBoef has done for 30 years.
How does any of this apply to Silicon Valley other than as a cute and wrong metaphor? Are we really taking leads from dogs?
Animal brains too.
just lift, read the stoics, and master something. you'll get there.
While the alpha terminology may have come from dog packs, it's not exactly unobservable in other species, and even on these forums and in VC funding rounds you can observe people both jacking each other off with a healthy amount of social and institutional pandering and financial support, and other people not posting as much but taking dominant positions to "secure the bag" and whatever is downstream from that.
People don't like these conversations but it doesn't change the reality.
Given that, it is not unreasonable to wonder (hope?) that there might be human living conditions that reduce "brutally dominant social heirarchy".
The best part is: we even appear to have archeological evidence that this is true, for humans!
IME the theory is a reactionary (i.e., anti-liberal, anti-humanitarian, anti-human rights) myth to justify the rule and worship of power.
It's probably more viscerally visible in poorer parts of the world, though trying to compare which is worse, is not very clear. You could argue in the western countries it's easier for someone to become entrenched and cement a position of "top dog" while if you are in a tribe in Africa the position is more fluid and volatile.
I think using the term 'brutally dominant' I invoked images of violence, and maybe something like 'cut-throat' is (ironically) more apt. While you yourself may be in a good and comfortable position, it doesn't negate the reality that people vie for positions of power all over the world every day and have for the entirety of history. We are not just Bonobos living in a forest.
if you mean literal brutality, but how the uber wealthy treating those of lower wealth could be considered brutal as well--in modern parlance of course.
Could you share the basis for saying they do, for those who are not primatologists?
> even on these forums and in VC funding rounds you can observe ...
How is that 'alpha wolf' behavior?
> People don't like these conversations
Has someone objected?
You can look it up yourself, plenty of published research. I'm not a primatologist either but still managed to educate myself.
> Has someone objected?
You seem to be, in the most snide and backhanded way possible.
More generally yes people have been preaching (since the 60s majorly but obviously before that) that being kind, and that peace and love is and mutual reciprocity is not only one way to go about in life, but _it's the only way_ that you should pursue. And this very much the mainstream opinion. Meanwhile central banks have been printing money at zero interest to give to their friends, Saudis have been selling oil, states have been buying up weapons, bribing the US, etc.
And guess what? All of those people have lot more power and influence on the world today, than a guy living in the desert preaching how humans should be perfectly balanced at one with each and nature.
> How is that 'alpha wolf' behavior?
Zuckerberg retaining complete voting shares wasn't a power play? Altman returning to oust the board and be CEO of OpenAI wasn't a power play? Investors leveraging the outsized gains from an early success to bet on further outsized gains isn't a power play?
I mean you have to be an idiot not to see it. You literally just observe all human societies. You have some leader at the top, the president, a king etc. etc. Then you have CEOs, VPs, Managers, team leads etc etc.
Human society is structured around alphas. Clearly. No I take that back. Humans are more similar to bonobos. At least that's how it is when I go to work we just jack each other off all day, no team leads or CEO where I work.
In short, alpha does not imply male or violence. It’s someone for whatever reasons is at the top (eq, iq, physical attributes, confidence, etc). It also depends on the group, think big fish/small pond.
They are equally close (tree-wise, percent-wise idk), and they exhibit a radically different and mostly nonviolent matriarchal social hierarchy. Not sure what the takeaway from that should be other than that maybe there shouldn't be a takeaway if our two closest relatives (and each others closest relatives) behave so differently from one another.
I mean the interesting question is whether it is necessary, if we were maximally Bonobo would we have built the civilizations and technology we have? Possibly, but it's not beyond the realms of thought that the drive to amass power, to be the alpha or top dog, has driven action and risk taking, low probability paths to outsized gains.
There is a second question about whether we should be more Bonobo like now, but we are what we are and there is 7 billion people on the planet.
The connection to wolf pack social dynamics is very thin.
I think Sapiens talks about this.
Some spiders eat their partner after mating, should we do that?
Some animals defecate to mark territory, should we do that?
Many abandon their children after birth or even eat their babies.
Maybe we should use artificial ovipositors and proboscises.
People want to ordain their ideology with the notion of natural order to claim it as scientific law. The accuracy of the underlying animal claim is irrelevant because the logic connecting some random animal to humans is nonsense.
Have you spent time with many married couples? ;)
Should we use our feces to mark territory? Probably not, but when the concept of marking territory is as pervasive as it is then maybe it's worth considering how we would like to handle it to avoid falling back to feces.
Many animals eat feces, that's extremely pervasive. It's an intrinsic part of the ecosystem. It's really hard to overstate how important poop from other animals is. Doesn't mean I should be cooking it for dinner.
Applying any behavior as having any meaning at all to humans, whether it be wolves or lobsters, other than that we should respect it, is complete nonsense.
There are no lessons to learn about how we should structure our workspace or allocate tax dollars by watching how jellyfish or seasnails live, any claim otherwise is merely ideological projection and creative license.
What this article doesn't mention is the eating of puppies. The big bad wolf is not a gentle wolf.
Yeaa..... this is a huge stretch. I'm not a hustle culture proponent by any means (Patagonia's 'let them go surfing' seems great to me!), but "Move fast and break things" is a pragmatic mantra that speaks to the nature of enterprises in highly competitive markets.
Laypeople will balk at the idea of "breaking things". But that's hubris. It takes humility to admit that the breaking things part of discovery and invention isn't isn't optional. Fast or slow, you will break things pursuing an idea unknown space. The mantra speaks to the need to adjust risk tolerances in futuristic-leaning businesses.
There are other ways, of course. Bio-med breaks things in controlled trials, for example. But it's also slow as molasses. Rife with in-fighting.
But to equate alpha-male captivity with futuristic pragmatism is a huge reach.
If the 'alpha' model is universally detrimental to success in business, it would quickly die out.
However it has not and most modern (and premodern) successful companies (by metrics of growth, profit, income, revenue, PE etc) have been founded and grown by "alpha" leaders and staff.
There are of course exceptions but we would expect the "alpha" model to instead be the exception if it was a less successful way of running a business.
In practice, both can co-exist and as a company matures it may, over time, switch between models.
Some people like the driven competitive environment and seek it out and will tend to end up at enterprises that favor the "alpha" model. Others who dislike such environments will seek out enterprises that utilize alternative models. An individual will likely be more productive in the environment best suited for them and an individual will rarely switch from a strong preference for one of these environments to a strong preference for an alternative environment.
If there is substantial dissatisfaction on the part of workers with the "alpha" model and an alternative model would be more productive and successful, startups would blossom that use alternative models and hire away the cream of the crop of the "alpha" companies' employees.
Citation needed. By my estimation, the overwhelming majority of CEOs are doughy, effete city slickers who are the exact opposite of the prototypical "alpha male" image.
Zuckerberg, with his MMA training, might be the only one I can think of that fits the stereotype.
Don't confuse the putative "alpha male" with simply being a douchebag, because I can think of quite a large number of CEOs that fit that latter description, but it's not the same thing.
Can you clarify the distinction? Most people criticising the "alpha" model seem to equate the two.
Umm... isn't the whole point of an "alpha" to be the top-man... so how would there be more than one? That doesn't make any internally logical sense.
> An individual will likely be more productive in the environment best suited for them
Good premise, but you don't need the "alpha" theory to argue it.
> in determining if the "alpha" concept is a "more successful" model in business.
You do a really poor job of explaining what this even means, but it sounds bogus from your description. No offense intended.
The point is they're top of their pack, not top of the whole world.
It’s hierarchical and masculine, no doubt, and describes Linus Torvalds and Steve Jobs as well as Walt Disney and Thomas Edison or even General Patton.
This leadership model might not be everyone’s cup of tea but it can definitely be successful, and it’s definitely a real thing, not just some redpill / PUA fantasy.
Are human emotions, please don't anthropomorphise.
Selfishness is the default setting, and is easy to explain in evolutionary terms. Unselfishness is what usually surprises us when we see it in animals.
Cooperation is at the basis of all of nature. The difference between "competition" and "cooperation" is usually a matter of perspective and human bias. They are two sides of the same coin. We fit details about nature into one of those two frameworks to uphold a specific worldview we find useful for organizing information. Historically we've favored the competition framework, but take a look at the Annual Reviews journals for a field like Ecology, Mycology, Biology, etc and I think you'll see this is quickly changing
The author isn't saying nature isn't cruel. They're saying wolf packs don't work the way we imagine them to in popular culture.
You don't have males duking it out to be the alpha. (That's closer to gorillas and chimpanzees, though even among them it's rare.) You have a breeding pair and their pups. Wolf packs aren't monarchies, they're emergent clusters of wolves around a breeding pair that goes away when the breeding pair perishes. A younger wolf "challenging" an older wolf for dominance isn't the natural state; it's the space-constrained state that emerges in captivity. (Even that might be giving it too much credit.)
and "nearly everything dies from being eaten", yes, because nearly everything is in the human meat eating food chain, I kid you not.
no. the lens that depicts the world at constant war is projecting a mix of maybe personal experience and certainly group think onto an otherwise surprisingly cooperative and supportive nature.
https://scholar.google.de/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=coope...
Nature is build around what works best for the survival of the individual's genetics in the current environment. That is called evolution.
You can't even project the human concept of selfishness on this. A worker ant supports its genetical survival best by sacrificing its life for the community.
To understand evolutionary developed strategies a wonderful tool is the calculation of probability. Science knows something about how to choose good strategies, and that may help us to understand 'why' evolution optimized for this and that.
In the case of groups of hunters (or many other groups), we know that cooperation is often superior to constant internal fighting. And choosing the best strategic thinker as the leader instead of the biggest bully is obviously a good idea in many scenarios. It is very reasonable that the wolves' leader selection process has optimised itself in such a direction.