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Comment by ninetyninenine | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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....

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

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

Dominance != aggression

(South park had interesting episode on that)

Which episode are you thinking of?

> 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.

> 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)

> 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...

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

>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.

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