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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean the first thing that comes to mind is lions and gorillas. Also CEOs in human societies. I mean are they not alphas? Don't we structure our teams according to leaders? Alphas litter human society and organizations. I feel the author is blind not to be able to see the highly pyramidal structure of alphas that encompasses every facet of human culture.
But in popular discourse there’s also a sense of ‘alphas’ getting into their position by violence or assholery that I think your definition is missing.
Even in scientific discourse, there is the idea that ‘alphas’ must gain their position by dominance - not by other methods (prestige, age, etc).
People use words in different ways, so in a way your definition is as good as any other, but (as with anything language related) you can’t really insist on it if others think it means something different and you want to have reasonable conversations with them (ironically, insisting on your definition seems like an attempt to assert dominance).
Edit: removed some snark, sorry. But I’ll also add: the article uses the scientific usage I mentioned above: wild real wolf pack ‘leaders’ aren’t ‘alphas’ because they don’t maintain their position by dominating the other wolves.
1. Official Dictionary Definitions Oxford English Dictionary (OED): Alpha (in social contexts):
"A person who assumes a dominant role in a particular group, especially one who is respected or influential."
Merriam-Webster Dictionary: Alpha (as in 'Alpha Male/Female'):
"The most dominant, powerful, or assertive person in a particular group."
Nowhere in these definitions does it state that an alpha must use violence or aggression to gain dominance.
2. Scientific Studies on Leadership & Alpha Behavior Study: Dominance Hierarchies in Social Animals Dugatkin, L. A. (1997). "Winner and Loser Effects and the Structure of Dominance Hierarchies." Behavioral Ecology, 8(5), 583-587.
"Dominance hierarchies in animal and human groups are often established through social signaling, resource control, and cooperation rather than brute force."
Study: Leadership Without Aggression in the Animal Kingdom Smith, J. E. et al. (2016). "Obligate Sociality Without Cooperation: Insights From Other Taxa." Behavioral Ecology, 27(1), 1-14.
"Alphas are often those who exhibit superior social intelligence, cooperation, and decision-making ability rather than reliance on aggressive behaviors."
These studies explicitly state that alphas do NOT require violence to gain or maintain their status.
3. Leadership Psychology: Alphas Lead Without Coercion Goleman, D. (1995). "Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ." Bantam Books.
"True leaders, or ‘alphas’ in human social dynamics, are those who possess high emotional intelligence, resilience, and ability to influence without coercion."
Bass, B. M. (1990). "From Transactional to Transformational Leadership: Learning to Share the Vision." Organizational Dynamics, 18(3), 19-31.
"Successful leadership is based on vision, respect, and strategy. Coercion and force are indicative of weak leadership rather than true dominance."
These sources define "alpha" as a leader who influences others positively, not through aggression.
4. Debunking the Claim That "Alpha" = Violence L. David Mech (1999). "Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs." "The term 'alpha' is often misunderstood. In both animals and humans, successful leadership is based on intelligence, decision-making ability, and social bonding—not brute force."
Mech, 1999
This refutes the claim that alpha = inherently violent.
Final Conclusion: The Definition of "Alpha" Does NOT Require Violence Dictionaries define "alpha" as dominance through leadership, not necessarily aggression. Scientific studies show that dominance in social animals is often achieved through cooperation and intelligence. Leadership psychology research confirms that true human "alphas" lead through respect and influence, not assholery. The idea that "alpha" = "violent dictator" is a pop culture myth, not backed by science or formal definitions.
You can have societies be temporarily violent like how Americans slaughtered and killed Native Americans and took over the continent. The formation of the USA comes from this type of effective violence. Who would be the alphas in this case? the native americans? Or the ones that invaded? I know I'm a bit on the nose here, but this is just reality.
But I would agree with them that leadership does not require dominance.
I don't even think the concept of violence makes sense when the being causing it has sufficient cognition.
Violence is like a key on a piano. You were born with it. You can choose not to play that note, but it is always there, it is never not there.
You can choose to play great melodies without the violence note. You can choose to play melodies with the violence note. You can be forced in a corner and have no option but to hammer the violence key until the strings scream.
Do you have a link for this definition? I'm unable to find it or the one you attribute to Merriam-Webster on their websites.
(Their websites are shit. I'm curious about the dates around those definitions.)
The main thing I take away from the paper is that (in computer simulations) bigger winner effects and bigger loser effects lead to strongly defined hierarchies. Fewer subjects have ambiguous positions.
I'm not sure the paper speaks much to which strategies (e.g. violence vs cooperation) are more common or effective.
No? Look:
Your Merriam-Webster quote (although I can't find it online)
"the most dominant, powerful, or assertive person"
That's not becoming a leader by being helpful and getting people's trust.
It's instead dominance and assertiveness, that's something else.
I think you mistakenly what to have the word "alpha" mean the same thing as "leader". But I think that's not how people in general look at these words.
It does not at all represent itself as even taking a specific side on the meaning of "alpha" let alone testify to an academic consensus of any decisive proof one way or the other. It doesn't even have anything to do with the study itself at all.
The line you quoted seems more like an aside. The study was apparently about a simulated game theoretic model, and even refers to the units in the simulation as "combatants". It is an attempt to model and simulate "winner effects" and "loser effects" in tandem over time. It's mostly interested in contrasting this approach with models that only deal with "winner effects" or "loser effects" but not their simultaneous dynamics.
It ends with a modest expression of hope to spur future similar studies and is not even pretending to venture anything like a final definition of "alpha", let alone represent the full weight of academic consensus on that question. Citing it for that purpose feels like drive-by quote mining.
0. https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article-abstract/8/6/583/208...
I mean that's all true enough, but their point, at least narrowly read as a general observation about animals, stands. There are ample examples in nature of dominance hierarchies, even if wolves aren't one of them.
Of course, as you note, looking to these examples as a basis for a personal ethos for tough guy psychology is error riddled in so many ways you could write a book unpacking it all. (E.g. why choose other animals remote from the lineage of apes to which we belong, why for that matter not just study humans in the first place, why hitch any ethos to what happens in nature, why not look at what it says about people who seem to need to indulge in this search, etc.)
It's good to show that this argument fails on its own terms with its own chosen example, but getting into that kind of back and forth risks implicitly agreeing that it would be right to think that way, should such an example be found in nature. And those examples do exist in nature even if not necessarily with wolves.
But as you noted that doesn't have anything to do with better or worse, right or wrong, and is completely lacking in self-awareness about the actual psychological dynamics that causes people to need these kinds of narratives.
Some people play into that game, others see through it.
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.
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.
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.
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....
(South park had interesting episode on that)
"Dominating behaviour" is frequently used to refer to aggression, albeit not necessarily violent aggression. (I would like to blame the sociologists, but I think this mess is mostly the work of pop scientists.)
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
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.
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.
Could you elaborate what is the meaning of “alpha”? (I sense there is definition, that is being kept secret from me)
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...
I think same sentiment persists when alpha->”your leader” replacement is made.
Another common colloquial usage is total self obsessed wanker.
Don't project, don't assume you can read minds and emotional states over the internet.
Of course we here in Australia think of anyone bandying about "alpha" as a tosser .. how else do you suppose they'd be thought of?
They're literally right there with people that use "Bro" in a sentence and espouse paleo diets.
We're talking about the definition in a more formal context. Of course I don't go around saying hey "that dude is an alpha" or "i'm an alpha."
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.
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?
"Am I so out of touch? No. It's the children who are wrong." - Principal Skinner
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]
--
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.
They are not required to have CEOs who therefore sit on shakier legal ground.
Varies by jurisdiction. Common ones are a president, secretary and treasurer. (They can be the same person.)
That’s equivalent to the male on the couch watching TV with a shotgun on his lap defending his territory and the females going hunting (aka kitchen) to make the husband a sandwich.
Joking aside the males are the leaders. How do I know? They kill the kids on arrival and the females can’t do fuck shit.
That's a myth.
Male lions do hunt. When hunting alone and not as "heavy support" for the females, they use different strategies than the females, and do it in a different environment. I read an article from a researcher about that in particular, can't remember any context to find it quickly though.
There are many (scientific and casual) articles like that though:
- https://singita.com/archive/wildlife/wildlife-mythbusters-ta...
- https://medium.com/@shelldonwells/do-male-lions-hunt-e9f5ea5...
The ceos are groveling to investors, aka billionaires. I guess those guys are the true alphas.
I would argue that the wealthy which hold loans based on stock collateral are holding debt and not credit. US banking laws are just hiding the fact. So a number of rich people you define as alpha are not really alpha because of debt vs credit imbalance.
This means the person spending money while going through Disney World are alpha.
You’re just being pedantic. I don’t need to explain to you why people intrinsically know Elon musk is an alpha and the person going to Disney world is a beta.
ANd even that HNer knows his contrary opinion is backwater. Trump and Elon get a lot of hate, but they are leaders on the apex of the human status hierarchy.
Trump can’t spell “Colombia” and Elon is, at best, an idiot savant.
Is it you? Because you don’t spend all day trolling people or you don’t paint your face orange? Let’s get back in touch with reality please.
Seems you hold the alpha mentality deeply and respect those you seem as alpha. By your own logic, cult leaders are alpha and should be respected.
Respect can only be earned, continuously reinforced, and lost in a single moment. Respect cannot be demanded or forcefully requested.
Watch the first episode of "Band of Brothers". Who would you want as a leader, the alpha, one with power, Captain Herbert Sobel or 2nd Lutenaint Richard Winters, the one without power?
I don't have an overall point here other than that power isn't as simple as some people want it to be. You command a ship until there's a mutiny. There are hierarchies, but that's only one way of slicing things. It's more about a set of several feedback loops that nobody explicitly understands.
You will see that society converges towards alphas. There have been attempts to make everything egalitarian but it doesn’t last and alphas pop up everywhere. Heck you can’t even make a purely voting society where society votes on everything. Instead everyone votes for an alpha. Aka trump.
I don’t like your tone. When you say not everyone behaves like Americans you sound like you’re implying superiority as if Americans don’t behave well and I have to conform to your version of good behavior. Change your tone or I won’t continue with you.
For a good primer on hierarchy dynamics in human systems, I recommend Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan.
In what Logan calls stage 3 leadership, organizations cluster around individual “rockstar” people - and this is the vast majority of human organizations.. they estimate 80%.
In Stage 4, it’s all rockstar people organized around values vs. a person.
You certainly still have people who have authority through competency, but people aren’t granted authority based purely on “position”.
Stage 4 culture are the best in the world, and learning how to build them is a worthwhile skill.
Better ones are chickens and horses. (Females, I believe, in both cases.)
Gorillas have a variety of social structures, only one which involves the Silverback fighting for dominance [1]. With lions, meanwhile, the females eat first [2].
> are they not alphas? Don't we structure our teams according to leaders?
Leaders, yes. Hotheads, no. The “alpha” hypothesis states that the most aggressive rises to the top.
See here on what an alpha is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42848939
Also for chickens, I've raised chickens. Trust me the rooster is the leader and that thing is a male.
Of course. Nobody argued aggression isn’t effective. The argument is it isn’t the effective strategy, just one among many.
> See here on what an alpha is
You’re taking a definition that arose from animal observations and then filtered through anthropological and management academia. Colloquial, academic and industry definitions have diverged on this term; it’s probably being redefined in American English right now.
> Also for chickens, I've raised chickens
Chickens are the correct analogy. If you’re leading a team of people who remind you of chickens, leading with aggression works. (Not exaggerating. Some situations respond well to e.g. raising one’s voice or acting out frustration.)
As your sources show, that isn’t necessary for leadership.
I cited two dictionaries as well.
>Chickens are the correct analogy. If you’re leading a team of people who remind you of chickens, leading with aggression works. (Not exaggerating. Some situations respond well to e.g. raising one’s voice or acting out frustration.)
Analogies were never part of the equation. You know they weren't. You were talking about animals explicitly not animals as an analogy. I feel you're trolling.
Those are point-in-time snapshots. The Wikipedia article expands on the term's etymology [1].
(If you can provide links to those definitions I'll help look up when they were adopted. I couldn't find the definition you quoted on Webster's website [2], for example.)
> Analogies were never part of the equation
The term is an analogy. That's the point. There was a term in animal ethology that was popularised to the point it entered mainstream use. Synonymising alpha to leadership, moreover, is even more recent and mostly occuring in American English (and now, with partisan flair).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_and_beta_male
[2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alpha#word-histor...
Hierarchies are naturally born out of confrontations and how they're settled, and captivity (ie scarcity) breeds confrontations. If two separate entities have opposing wants which cannot be satisfied simultaneously (ie are mutually exclusive), how do you determine who get's what they want? Well, naturally some kind of fight happens. Which either involves displays of intimidation, threats, arguments, or acts of violence (ie aggression).
Naturally, living organisms value life and consider risks which threaten their livelihood, and so, these situations are always an assessment of wants, such as "is my want for the last piece of food, greater than my want to avoid fighting my opponent?" Or, "Am I willing to risk dying for this? Do I need this food, do I need to fight this opponent or can I get food elsewhere before dying of starvation?".
As so, animals typically use violence as a last resort for settling disputes, unless the risks are so low as to be play (ie you're certain to win). It should therefore not be surprising that captive animals (or animals backed into a corner) feel obligated to fight, as they have few alternatives to avoid confrontation. Whereas, non-captive animals, by being more free, are better able to avoid a direct confrontation, and therefore exhibit less acts of aggression.
An alpha, just happens to be those who win disputes repeatedly, and opponents or potential opponents have learned to be intimidated by them, and so cede disputes to them when they arise without fighting. A hierarchy is thus naturally formed from repeated disputes.
There has been some research that shows primates are more likely to cooperate in scarcity and compete during abundance.
Not universal and other factors are at play, but chimps generally prefer to cooperate vs compete.
I argue that the 2 greatest factors for human survival have been our creativity and cooperation.
We run an AI Research Lab every week where this is a central theme, helping folks navigate uncertainty through a focus on creativity and cooperation.
It's almost as if reality is more nuanced than what 4Chan taught us: CEOs have people they need to answer to, people they're scared of, and that's part of what it means to be a human.
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.
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..."